News at Eleven

[Basho's] despair only deepened in 1682, when his house burned to the ground in a fire that obliterated much of Edo. He wrote:

Tired of cherry,
Tired of this whole world,
I sit facing muddy sake
And black rice.

In 1684 Basho made a months-long journey westward from Edo, which occasioned his first travel account, Journal of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton. In Basho's day travel was by foot and lodging was primitive. But despite these rigors he set out again in 1687 and a third time in 1687-1688, journeys recounted in Kashima Journal and Manuscript in a Knapsack. Both were written in a genre that Basho profoundly refined--haibun, a mixture of haiku and prose.

from National Geographic: On the Poet's Trail
also National Geographic: On the Poet's Trail: Interactive Travelogue
also National Geographic: On the Poet's Trail: Photo Gallery

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Yet according to the NEA report, in 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months. That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years.

Sunil Iyengar, the NEA's director of the Office of Research and Analysis, says the agency can't answer with certainty why fewer adults are reading poetry. He and others believed the opposite would be true, largely because of poetry's expansion onto the Internet. "In fact," he says, "part of our surmise as to why fiction reading rates seem to be up might be due to greater opportunities through online reading. But we don't know why with poetry that's not the case."

from Newsweek: The End of Verse?

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[Ted] Hughes was a hands-on father. In a letter to Assia, he wrote that "Nicky has impetigo on his face--a spread-up wound the size of a shilling, beside his nose, developed from a scratch. So he's off school, and I'm sending him with ointment from Webb. Every little scratch he gets just lately turns immediately septic".

In another letter to her, he proudly reported that "Nicky is evidently a very good painter at school. They've both become mad about Plasticene." He encouraged his son to draw and paint, rewarding him with a shilling for good work, and nothing when he thought it was careless.

from Telegraph: Ted Hughes, the devoted father

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[Andrew] Motion has said that the job of writing verse for the Royal Family is "thankless" and even gave him a case of writer's block.

Yet, speculation about who may follow in his footsteps is growing, with bookmakers making Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy firm favourites.

Here is a rundown of some of the names in the frame for the UK's most prestigious--and arguably unenviable--post in poetry.

from BBC News: Poet Laureate: Runners and Riders

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Everywhere we dug there were white bones.
. . .What kind of foundation would they make for our house?

My friends were perplexed. Were they our bones or their bones?
. . . The Americans left years ago and took their bones with them.

These skeletons, scattered all over our land,
Belong only to Vietnamese,
--"Quang Tri" in Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars 1948-1993.

There is no easy rebuilding after war. Literally or metaphorically, the survivors of the war are building upon the skeletons of the soldiers who fell while fighting for them.

from Crookston Daily Times: Poetry and the Vietnam War: The power of words to heal

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"Gasa" (Kasa), a form of poetry popular during the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910), has long been consigned to oblivion for modern Koreans who learn it only in their high school days.

But the traditional poetry has been revived in an English translation by Prof. Lee Sung-il, who retired from the English Department of Yonsei University last month.

from The Korea Times: Ancient Korean Poems Resonate in English

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"World's End," like much Neruda, contains bewildering multitudes. Some poems incite, others console, as the poet--maestro of his own response and impresario of ours--looks inward and out. "The century of the exiled,/the book of the exiled./The brown century, the black book,/this is what I must leave/written and open in the book,/exhuming it from the century/and bleeding it in the book," he writes in "Saddest Century," one of the final poems here, "those who keep leaving behind/their loves and their mistakes/thinking that maybe maybe/and knowing never never/and it was my turn to sob/this dusty wail/for those who lost the earth/and to celebrate with my brothers . . . the victorious buildings,/the harvests of new bread."

from Los Angeles Times: 'World's End' by Pablo Neruda

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Pretending to be taken aback, [Robert] Frost asked [Ellery] Sedgwick if he were sure he wanted to publish Frost's poems. "Yes," said Sedgwick. "Sight unseen?" asked Frost. "Sight unseen," said Sedgwick. Pulling from his pocket the three poems he had read at Tufts only the night before, Frost waved them under Sedgwick's nose, while, according to Frost, Sedgwick made little grabs for them. "Are you sure that you want to buy these poems?" Frost inquired.

from The Atlantic: The First Three Poems and One That Got Away

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[T.S. Eliot] went on: "After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm--in fact there couldn't have been an Animal Farm without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."

Eliot's rejection might have been prompted by the political situation at the time, when Russia was regarded as an essential ally to defeat Hitler.

Animal Farm was only published in August 1945, three months after the war in Europe ended.

from Telegraph: T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm because of its 'Trotskyite' politics

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[by Mary Jo Bang]

Once

Once there was my life and it was a thing

from Record: Poet's perfect profession

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Farewell To The Earth by Christopher James

from The Guardian: Farewell To The Earth by Christopher James
also The Guardian: Christopher James wins the National Poetry Competition

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Great Regulars

[Michael] Castro stands an old fear on its head, that to prune means to lose. He is saying no, it's a concentration, a revitalization, a "focus of energy" so that we can spring back stronger than ever.

In the second couplet, Castro doesn't warn us of dire consequences but encourages us to go ahead and cut, perhaps even the limb we may be standing on. In the falling, in the brushing ourselves off and standing up, who knows what we will discover--perhaps nothing less than who we really are. Then again, we might discover that we can fly.

Poet in a Tree

for Gabor G. Gyukics

from Walter Bargen: The Post-Dispatch: Missouri Poets: Michael Castro

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Around this time of year, those who talk about poetry at all often talk about its "relevance to life," meaning the life we've all agreed is true. But the greatest power of poetry may be the wild, individual voice that's nothing like what we've thought of as life, before.

And about this time of year, those who talk about poetry at all will complain that a poem should be easy to understand, or why bother? But when we dumb poetry down, pretty soon we've eliminated the possibility of the deep engagement with the sometimes seemingly intractable language, which can change us.

from Fleda Brown: Traverse City Record-Eagle: On Poetry: A challenge for Poetry Month

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During the course of the celebratory evening, [Seamus] Heaney selected a pair of poems to read in honour of what many call "the sacramental Cohen," one of which he also delivered, IIRC, at the Nobel ceremony, 1984's "The Underground."

He also read one of the most nearly perfect poems exquisitely suited to this Holy Season in our (now) shared language, "A Drink of Water" (1979):

Here, (said poetry-blogging she, donning her critical cap), Heaney first creates a world inhabited by the sacred dignity of the catch-as-catch-can quotidian consonant with the past and redolent with those oppressive "Troubles":

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: On Other Words: Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney honoured

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"The perfect poem," [Erin] Mouré additionally muses, clearly equivocating vis-à-vis that earlier question, the one that's struck her as germane to all it is a poet shapes and makes, "the perfect poem is the one that touches me at the moment of reading and exposes me to something outside my being that, paradoxically, shows me that in me, too, is something that is outside of my being. Language is mine, and is not mine. The language of the poem shatters the cogito, which was always never unified: the language of the poem pulls the mask of self-unity off the cogito, I guess."

Cogito ergo doleo? Does Mouré think a poem can change the world?

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: On Other Words: Traversing the mysterious Mouréan terrain

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Emily Dickinson's seventeen-line poem, "The Robin's my Criterion for Tune," contains a famous line that the poet used to describe her world-view, "Because I see--New Englandly." And because she looked with the eyes of an American New Englander, she dramatizes the things she sees and experiences in her neck of the woods with pride of place.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Dickinson's The Robin's my Criterion for Tune

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The problem with the portrayal of this poor little rich girl is that it is painted by a person who knew the wealthy woman at age twenty and then did not see her again until the privileged woman was forty-three. Yet the speaker expects her readers/listeners to accept this pathetic portrayal as factual.

This poem sneers at this woman and draws conclusions about her life about which it is impossible for the narrator to know.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Kay's Pathedy of Manners

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In the eleventh quatrain, the speaker's companion branches into the many lives the speaker has lived. Not only has he crossed these fields and valleys as a youth, but also as he was maturing to adulthood, he experienced these pleasant hikes many times at many different times of his life, thus "like the cloudy shadows/Across the country blown/We two fare on for ever,/But not we two alone."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: March Poet--A. E. Housman

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By clicking on the U. S. map offered in this section of the Web site, the reader can locate his own state to find out about events close to home. In addition to National Poetry Month activities, however, the state site includes information about the state's poet laureate, if it has one, and a list of other poets who hail from the state.

Of all of the projects and activities, the "Poetry Map" feature is probably the most useful one offered for the dissemination and promotion of poetry information.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: National Poetry Month--April 2009

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The speaker refers to the notion that light-skinned, blonde women were held in higher esteem than dark-skinned, raven-haired women. This fact, of course, simply reflects the part of the world where the speaker resides--in a zone where less sun would encourage less melanin production in human skin and hair.

The object of Petrarchan sonnets, "Laura," is described as "fair-haired," and some of the "dark lady" sonnets protest against the idealization of women found in these and earlier highly romanticized poems.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 127

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The speaker then comically creates the image of his lips changing place with the keys on the keyboard. Her fingers are gently pressing those keys, and he would prefer her fingers be playing over his lips. He offers the melodramatic notion that her fingers playing over those "dancing chips" or keys is "Making dead wood more bless'd than living lips."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 128

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The speaker makes it clear that the human mind is capable of understanding that the strong sex urge should be eschewed, except for procreation; thus he claims that the whole world knows this fact, yet the irony of the human condition plays out time and time again: despite the knowledge of right behavior, the human often falls pray to the false promise of "the heaven that leads men to this hell."

Instead of heeding the warning from the soul and from the great spiritual leaders and from great philosophical thinkers who have warned against this satanic act, the weak human being allows himself to be sucked into this depravity over and over again.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 129

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Many beginners in the study of yoga easily grasp the idea that they are not the physical body, but it is more difficult to grasp that they are also not the mind. The body is readily available to sense awareness, but the mind seems to be as invisible (unsensedetectable) as the soul is. One cannot see, hear, taste, touch, or smell the mind.

But the mind is as delusion-invoking as the body. And in yoga meditation, the beginner learns quickly that the mind is even harder to control than the body.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's I Am He

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The point of the column is to bring poetry into the lives of everyday people. Many people don't read poetry anymore, but they should, because it holds many answers to our concerns, or clues for how we can cope.

Like, for example, what if you need help accepting your ugly shoes because the economy is poor and you can't afford to buy a new pair?

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: What Would Ovid Do?

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In spring, a person's thoughts naturally turn toward what you would rather be doing than earning a living, and in America this usually means Being An Artist. This is the true American dream. Winning the lottery is a faint hope, becoming a sports hero is a daydream, but publishing poetry is the ambition of one-third of the American people and another third are thinking about writing a memoir.

from Garrison Keillor: Chicago Tribune: Spring reminds that we'd rather be artists

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Fiction
by Mark Strand

I think of the innocent lives

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Fiction by Mark Strand

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Meditation on Ruin
by Jay Hopler

It's not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Meditation on Ruin by Jay Hopler

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No Matter How Far You Drive
by Louis Jenkins

I sat between Mamma and Daddy.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: No Matter How Far You Drive by Louis Jenkins

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Suddenly
by Louis Simpson

The truck came at me,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Suddenly by Louis Simpson

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Teaching Poetry to 3rd Graders
by Gary Short

At recess a boy ran to me

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Teaching Poetry to 3rd Graders by Gary Short

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When Somebody Calls after Ten P.M
by Bruce Dethlefsen

Suicide Aside
by Bruce Dethlefsen

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: When Somebody Calls after Ten P.M by Bruce Dethlefsen

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Why We Speak English
by Lynn Pedersen

Because when you say cup and spoon

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Why We Speak English by Lynn Pedersen

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I've gotten to the age at which I am starting to strain to hear things, but I am glad to have gotten to that age, all the same. Here's a fine poem by Miller Williams of Arkansas that gets inside a person who is losing her hearing.

Going Deaf

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 209

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[Anne] Carson's choice of diction presents many puzzles. Why does Clytemnestra's lover seem to quote Scripture? Why, if speakability is Carson's aim, would she have one of her characters declare, "Look at him, look how he drips unhealth--shudder object!" Why would Helen be referred to--distractingly, jarringly--as a "weapon of mass destruction"?

Similar vagaries of pitch arise through Carson's decision to replicate Aeschylean word-coinages, where two words are compounded into one.

from Brad Leithauser: The New York Times: Family Feuds

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The narrator has not seen this mythical creature, yet it has a presence drawn on postcards and ashtrays. Lechliter sets up his story, then shifts to first-person experience of being alone on "dusty backroads" and "railroad tracks," places that evoke solitude. In these wanderings, his jackalope becomes a female, despite her masculine rack of antlers. She hides, survives, and leaves behind an intangible aroma. Is she not real?

The Jackalope

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: Gary Lechliter (1951 - )

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A Jury of Her Peers is longer on context than on textual interpretation. [Elaine] Showalter carefully traces the evolution of fiction, poetry and nonfiction written by women and analyzes their reception in the literary marketplace. In between short biographical sketches of the writers, she highlights features of their literature, noting, for instance, that many of the earliest works by women in America were captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson's. She charts the rise of the domestic novel in the 1850s and the concurrent rise in female readers. She demonstrates that women writers at the beginning of the 20th century saw the short story as the most authoritative form available to them, and she details the advent of Gothic-tinged fiction in the mid-20th century.

from Meghan O'Rourke: Miami Herald: The evolution of female literary voices in America

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In January, three weeks after my mom's death, I flew to L.A. and then drove to the Mojave Desert, where I spent a few days wandering around Joshua Tree National Park. Being alone under the warm blue sky made me feel closer to my mother, as it often has. I felt I could detect her in the haze at the horizons. I offered a little prayer up to her, and, for the first time since she died, I talked out loud to her. I was walking along past the cacti, when I looked out into the rocky distance. "Hello mother," I whispered. "I miss you so much."

from Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: The Long Goodbye

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Apostrophes should be quietly forgotten. German can do without them. It's inconsistent. We tell children the apostrophe is the possessive--but not for theirs, his, hers or its. In 50 years' time, people will look at our apostrophes and think: 'What a silly mess!'

from Michael Rosen: Metro: Michael Rosen's secret to a happy childhood

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But, however bitterly she confronts personal conflict, [Elinor Morton] Wylie retains her sharp-edged poise. This week's poem epitomises her ability to make a bold, hard metaphorical shell for difficult emotion. She packed her poems in salt, as Yeats advised, and they have lasted well. They deserve to be much better known.

Sanctuary

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Sanctuary

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For [Peter] Porter, the pleasure of strict form isn't simply musical. It also affords a glimpse of that Edenic world in which "the whole close patterning is seen at once./Everything is perfect, and of no concern" ("No Infelicitous Phrases Need Apply"). But Porter's present day is post-lapsarian, as his title poem, with its echo of John Lennon's apparent hubris, suggests. "Free Will for Man!" may demand the death of God, but it remains the case that it is the ideal "orchestra/at the Creation" who "can play/anything you put in front of them".

from Fiona Sampson: The Guardian: Trapped by language

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One night, a few years ago, I was standing in my garden when that Sunday afternoon long ago became suddenly present to me. I put it that way because it wasn't just being reminded of something long past and remembering it. It was much more vivid than that. It was as if the present moment had become transparent and I could see that earlier day as the palimpsest upon which all of my life had, in fact, been written.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: The moment of knowing

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Primed
by Paulann Petersen

It was middle June

from CounterPunch: Poets' Basement: Four Poems by Paulann Petersen

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[by Lorraine Mariner]

Section 3 - Write text - p.22

Jessica Elton is learning how to text

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Section 3 - Write text - p.22 by Lorraine Mariner

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By Randall Mann

In the half-mist of Golden Gate Park,

from Kansas City Star: Poet's Corner: 'Translation' by Randall Mann

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The Poem that Can't Be Written
by Lawrence Raab

from The New Yorker: Poetry: The Poem that Can't Be Written

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Trench Names
by A. S. Byatt

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Trench Names

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[by Jerry Harp]

I give my ears to sunlit piercings,

from The Oregonian: Poetry: "Testament"

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[by E.O. Barsalou]

Isaac

Isaac was our dog, you see.

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Isaac

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Irene Brown's new poetry pamphlet from Calder Wood Press includes this poem in memory of the writer's father, and the Scottish bandleader Jimmy Shand. The exuberance and vitality of these dancers and the music is irrepressible.

Keep it Simple, Son

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Irene Brown

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"Poem for Hannah"
By Matthew Zapruder

from Slate: "Poem for Hannah" By Matthew Zapruder

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Ode To The God of Atheists

by Ellen Bass

The god of atheists won't burn you at the stake

from The Sun Magazine: Poetry: Ode To The God of Atheists

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In style, the poem's use of stand-alone, factual observations, with no enjambements and no logical progressions between lines, mimics some of the condition it describes; but also draws an uneasy distinction between "It"--the condition, implacable and alien--and "him", the frightened and struggling boy, negotiating as best he can between his own limits and those of his family. Despite the dispassionate veneer--appropriate to his son's more machine-like moments--[Les] Murray delivers a powerful poem of humour, sadness, love and, surely, admiration.

It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen by Les Murray

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A few years ago, when reading an essay about the history of psychotropic drugs, I started a poem that used the names of these drugs as a kind of incantation. This lead me to recall what my college roommate, who killed himself, had once said about Thorazine, that it was "handcuffs for the mind." Eventually, this provided an avenue back to the poem I had wanted to write about my maternal grandmother.

from The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Michael Collier

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Poetic Obituaries

On the death of Ivan Cameron, six years old, the son of Opposition leader David Cameron and his wife Susanna.

He had suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

from The Shields Gazette: A poem for tragic Ivan

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As a reporter, and friend of Nicholas's, in Alaska, said: "Here he found somewhere he could be himself."

However, if Nicholas Hughes assiduously shunned the neon light that flashed around his parents' past, he was always close to his father.

Father and son shared a lifelong fascination with nature; Ted Hughes' wonderful, and savage, poetry of the wild and his son's avid studies of fish, their habits and habitat. Ted Hughes wrote to a friend of how he and Nicholas fished together in Africa, Ireland and in Alaska's 'dreamland'; how they 'lay awake, listening to wolves'.

Tragically, it emerged just last week that it was his father's death from cancer in 1998 that triggered Nicholas Hughes's depression.

from Independent.ie: A son lost to the deep wounds of Plath's sad death

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Its luminous alliteration transports us to childhood, in the hunt for a solemn and simple happiness. The presence of the verbs conjugated in the future predominates, projecting themselves into the future whilst weighing up the upsetting burden of today. The future is constellated with nostalgia, of a recurring past.

Our homage to Ilaria [La Commare] is a well-meaning translation of her 'Linden tree grains', an example of her skilled wordplay and her prose of poetic strokes, both volcanic and original.

Linden tree grains

from The Poetry Round: Ilaria La Commare's poetry in movement
also coffeefactory: cafebabel.com editor Ilaria La Commare, 30

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[Bill McCoubrey] loved writing poetry and reading. He was also very proud of winning the Hugh MacDiarmid Tassie for the best poem written in the Scottish language.

Bill loved to travel and was fluent in French and German.

from Hamilton Advertiser: Former libraries chief Bill dies at age of 69

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When Mr. [Gwinn F.] Owens left the editorship in 1986, he was succeeded by Mike Bowler, who edited the op-ed page until 1994.

"It was easy taking over because Gwinn had everything in place, and he passed along a great tradition to me. It was a good, lively page," said Mr. Bowler, who was The Sun's education editor and a columnist when he left in 2004.

"My contributors weren't necessarily professional writers. We had a cabdriver, a 13-year-old kid and people in prison. We had people from all walks of life. And we did poetry. We had lots of poetry," Mr. Bowler said.

from The Baltimore Sun: Gwinn F. Owens

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[Ennis] Rees served in the post through 1985. (Gov. Dick Riley tried to spread the appreciation for verse by appointing three poet laureates during his eight years in office.)

Rees' body of work ranged from poetry to literary criticisms to translations of Homer and Aesop. He also wrote children's books, often illustrated by Edward Gorey, with fanciful names such as "Gillygaloos and Gollywhoppers," "Teeny Tiny Duck and the Pretty Money" and "Windwagon Smith."

from The State: Ennis Rees: USC professor, state poet dies

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A poem written by 17-year-old Samantha Revelus, who police say was fatally stabbed by her brother on Saturday in a bloodbath in their home, speaks of a strong woman much like her friends described her. Revelus, who was of Haitian descent, had just returned from Milton High School, where she had rehearsed the poem, "Acquaintance," and was to deliver it at a poetry jam on Thursday night.

Acquaintance

from Associated Press: Before stabbing, Mass. poet talked of strength

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The poet and critic Derek Stanford, who has died aged 90, had reasons to be grateful to the novelist Muriel Spark, his one-time lover, but her characterisation of him as the fifth-rate, pushy writer Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) was not among them. Nor were her pronouncements on his 1963 work, Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study. "If Mr Stanford had applied to me," she wrote, "I would have advised against this undertaking."

But, 50 years after they parted, his poems seemingly inspired by the affair appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for several years, conjuring up too the doomed 1890s poets he identified with and championed.

from The Guardian: Derek Stanford

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[Gerrit Viljoen] continuing his studies abroad and obtained an MA from Cambridge followed by a D.Litt et Phil from Leiden in 1955, following his father's academic interest by researching the poetry of a classical Greek poet and author, Pindar.

Viljoen also followed his father's keen interest in politics.

from iafrica.com: Gerrit Viljoen dies

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Mid-America Press published her [Cecile Franking Wu's] book of poetry, From Ink and Sandalwood, described as a collection of works by a woman caught between the two cultures that most influenced her life--American and Chinese.

The poems centered on her parents, her family and topical subjects such as President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The book won the 1991 Thorpe Menn Award for Writing Excellence from The Kansas City Star, beating some heavy hitters, including the late Dan Quisenberry of Kansas City Royals fame.

from The Kansas City Star: Cecile Franking Wu was a poet in running shoes

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News at Eleven

It is, though, the question of how to be her [Sharon Old's] mother's daughter that most consumes her in this volume. Much of her life, it seems, has been engaged in devising strategies of liberation from that oppressive tie. One of the most remarkable poems in this collection has her metamorphose into a fly on the wall of her Puritan family home: "in each of the hundred/eyes of both of my compound eyes,/one wallpaper rose". It's an astonishing image for the terrible fixity of a pathological obsession.

from The Guardian: Flesh knew itself, and spoke

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While in the zoo, looking at the seals, [Frederick] Seidel says, "I once wrote a poem about a girl I was in love with. I compared her to a seal. . . . It was a poetic problem," he explains, "to connect the two--the girl and the seal--because it's really almost preposterous."

This is perhaps the least preposterous comparison to be found in Seidel's work. Long regarded as a kind of elegant cult figure in poetry circles, Seidel has a reputation that precedes him into every room: decadent, name-dropper, sexual dalliant, Ducati enthusiast, son of privilege.

from Los Angeles Times: 'Poems: 1959-2009' by Frederick Seidel

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"Doña Pinto?" I inquire of the nose. "Sí, and who might be asking?" The voice is frail and brittle. "Gabriela sent me," I explain.

"Gabriela who?" the nose wants to know. "Gabriela from the juice parlour." "Never heard of her." "She told me you were friends with Gabriela Mistral. Would you have five minutes to talk?" Slowly, the door slides open, revealing the nose to be attached to a short old lady in a woven dress and slippers.

from Financial Times: In search of poetry in Chile

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"When the family says sugar is spent, I wear my uniform, my constabulary tunic, to march to the anxiety charged queue to suppress all dissent when I jump the queue."

The poem also talks of an army chef who drives to a local service station on a private car to buy fuel ahead of other desperate motorists.

But hardly had the elated crowd finished congratulating the poet [Julius Chingono] for his candid poetry than some police details manning the police base summoned him into the wooden structure to quiz him on the poem.

from The Zimbabwe Times: Poet detained after reciting poem

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"The kingfishers sonnet is about the Scotist individuation of things," [Paul] Mariani writes of the poem's theological roots in the medieval Duns Scotus, "where…the opening lines flame out, and where things reveal themselves. . . . But more: it is about Christ playing--acting in all seriousness, at the same time delighting in the never-again-to-be-replaced distinctiveness of human beings in ten thousand separate places and revealed in the faces of those who keep God's graces":

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

from PBS: Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly: Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Despite his [Andrew Motion's] agent assiduously circulating his efforts, even then the agony did not stop: "News editors don't think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn't like the poem--then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem."

from The Guardian: 'No writing is as hard as this'--poet laureate's parting shot

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Out of respect for John Mark [Eberhart]'s wishes, no negative commentary here about The Star or its corporate parent, McClatchy. The city's paper of record has been much diminished of late, but somehow it only now feels to me like an aperture has closed, one that used to lead to poetry and humor, to a genuine love of writing and the desire to propagate that sensibility.

from Pitch Weekly: John Mark Eberhart has friends in KC

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And while the rhyme may not be all that sophisticated, there's still the onomatopoeia of it: "menuteket," "meshuteket" and "mithameket" together create an experience that's "metakteket"--that goes like clockwork; in other words, the whole poem proceeds like clockwork (as the army likes to say about an operation that has gone well), and thus reflects the reality it seeks to describe. However, despite the rhythmic and encouraging prosody, the poet still lets the truth peek through: It's as if he understood that this depiction of the situation has no long-term military, operational or diplomatic significance.

from Haaretz: A poem and its interpretation

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What's interesting about "Eating memories" is that the most obvious use of figurative language occurs in the last stanza where [Milena] Abrahamyan's speaker says she "bit into fruit that had been growing/in the belly of thorny mountains,/facing hot mother sun." Suddenly, the reader is given two instances, side by side of personification: that of the "belly" of the mountains and the "mother sun." Perhaps Abahamyan decides to use personification here to heighten the reader's attention to the detail that follows.

from The Armenian Reporter: The harvest of Abrahamyan's poem

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"A touching incident followed. His resting place had been marked by nothing better than a rude board bearing his name and the date of his death . . . some companies of Irish-American soldiers happened to pass through the locality; and, resolving that the spot of a countryman so gifted and so faithful should be properly marked, raised by subscription a monument of Carrara marble, inscribed with a brief but eloquent epitaph."

[Richard Dalton] Williams last poem is found in [Charles Anderson] Read's book:

"Song of the Irish-American Regiments"

from The Thibodaux Daily Comet: Union troops gave Irish poet a proper gravestone

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Yet the views of experts such as [Tarnya] Cooper and [David] Piper cannot be dismissed so easily.

An authentic portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581–1613) was bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1740. This picture bears a startling resemblance to the "Cobbe" painting (and its companions). Features such as a distinctive bushy hairline, and a slightly malformed left ear that may once have borne the weight of a jewelled earring, appear identical. Even the man's beautifully intricate lace collar, though not identical in pattern, shares overall design with "Cobbe", having square rather than rounded corners.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Shakespeare Unfound(ed)?

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Great Regulars

"I don't have a personality on the page. The language doesn't allow me to have a personality. The language knows I'm a complete idiot, and it just won't allow me . . . A good writer is the medium, not the message."

Which brings us to the latest extraordinary project from this astoundingly prolific (a book a year) author [Peter Ackroyd]: a prose translation (his publishers insist on calling it a "retelling") of Geoffrey Chaucer's great poem The Canterbury Tales.

from Bryan Appleyard: The Sunday Times: The retelling of Chaucer

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[Robert Sullivan's] book isn't intended to "myth-bust" Thoreau, Sullivan said. That's already been done. "The common myth that's busted is that he was a cheat, that he really didn't live alone in the woods but went back to town all the time. I'm kind of out to myth-bust the myth-busters."

Try saying that three times without taking a breath. If you did, Thoreau would enjoy it. He was a gregarious man, beloved by his friends and an enthusiastic dancer.

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Boomarks: What Thoreau really meant

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It cannot be burned by heat, it cannot be drowned by water, and it cannot be forced to suffer the trammels of aging.

Without this awareness and unity with one's love, or soul, the angry mob will "die for goodness, who have liv'd for crime." The speaker suggests that it is a crime against the soul not to live in it.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 124

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The speaker's desire always returns to the process of creating soulful masterpieces for later generations, not demonstrating his prowess to contemporaries by outward show.

The speaker also implies in the question that what he has created might, in fact, have a very short shelf life or might even bring negative criticism to him as their creator.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 125

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Suffering dreams, nightmares, and the traumas of birth and death repeated endlessly becomes boring and tiresome to the perfect soul that yearns to recognize its true self.

The speaker then declares that the troublesome repetitions of reincarnations can be avoided if the devotee realizes that "behind the wings of Thy blessings,/My soul can be safe in Thy keeping." If the devotee unites her soul with the Ultimate Reality, she regains the safety that that realization affords.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's The Little Eternity

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"But I tell you all this," [Ted] Hughes added, "with a hope that it will let you understand a lot of things. . . . Don't laugh it off. In 1963 you were hit even harder than me. But you will have to deal with it, just as I have had to."

Nicholas Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself March 16, Alaska State Troopers said. He was a man of science, not letters, the only member of his immediate family not to become a poet.

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Poet Sylvia Plath's son commits suicide in Alaska

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According to the Big Bopper. . .
by Gregory Orr

More stores being built. . .
by Gregory Orr

Hoarding your joys and despairs. . .
by Gregory Orr

According to the Big Bopper. . .

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: According to the Big Bopper. . . by Gregory Orr

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Anniversary: One Fine Day
by Walter McDonald

Who would sit through a plot as preposterous as ours,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Anniversary: One Fine Day by Walter McDonald

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The Blessing
by John Updike

The room darkened, darkened until

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Blessing by John Updike

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Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

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The Loon
by James Tate

A loon woke me this morning. It was like waking up

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Loon by James Tate

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Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We are All Writing God's Poem'
by Barbara Crooker

Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We are All Writing God's Poem' by Barbara Crooker

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The White Museum
by George Bilgere

My aunt was an organ donor

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The White Museum by George Bilgere

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To have a helpful companion as you travel through life is a marvelous gift. This poem by Gerald Fleming, a long-time teacher in the San Francisco public schools, celebrates just such a relationship.

Long Marriage

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 208

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The "white buffalo" may be drained of color by the sun-glare optics, it may be albino, or it may be a spiritual being--or all of these things. The narrator is surprised by the buffalo, but he cannot rouse the birds nor the girls, who accept this cosmos. The falling of night quiets his fears, as natural order returns. [James] Tate shows Kansas as a mythic place.

Late Harvest

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: James Tate

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Personally, I consider the prose poem a bastardized form, an affectation, an unnecessary diversion, and a bit of revolutionary snobbery. To my way of thinking, it is as illogical to write poetry in the form of prose as it would be to write prose in the form of poetry. And, in fact, a lot of modern verse reads like prose. Here's an example of the latter, the canonized poem by William Carlos Williams, "This Is Just To Say," which appears in almost every literature text, rendered without the original line breaks:

from Anthony Maulucci: Norwich Bulletin: Writing poetry in prose form is useless and inane

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Especially when it comes to artists, we should think of Elizabethan portraits not as passport photos but as album art or book-jacket portraits.

And if we accept that these paintings were exercises in image-making--in 17th-century spin doctoring--then why not embrace the Cobbe painting? Even if Shakespeare didn't actually sit for it, this is probably how he, like any other literary figure of the time, preferred to imagine himself: aloof, sexy, mysterious. And, more to the point, this is how most of us would prefer to imagine him too.

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: Is That Really You, Sweet Prince

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Passing on by Andrew Motion

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Passing on by Andrew Motion

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The other part of the problem is to do with reception. In every case, after I'd written these eight poems, I sent them to my agent, who sent them to newspapers, where they landed on news editors' desks. News editors don't think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn't like the poem--then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem.

I'm not the first laureate to complain about this.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: Yet once more, O ye laurels

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Zan [Aizong] said he had consulted a lawyer and would seek to defend his rights through the legal system.

"I don't know what the reason was. First they let me through. Then they didn't let me through. It was like a game of blind man's buff."

After Zan went back through immigration, his two-way pass allowing him into Hong Kong was stamped with the word "Canceled."

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: China Stops Blogger From Leaving

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Oscar Wilde begins his prison meditation, De Profundis, with an aphorism, not the light and witty kind for which his plays are famous, but one which resonates with bleak experience: "Suffering is one very long moment." Having reached the turning point in his despair, the disgraced writer goes on to set out his plan for transforming that experience into a different kind of art and a new kind of life, borrowing Dante's title La Vita Nuova for his own projected resurrection. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, this week's choice, is the fulfilment of that plan.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: The Ballad of Reading Gaol

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[Anne] Carson's very good at translating what a great writer means. Here are the Watchman's famous first lines from Agamemnon, which nearly word for word, might be:

Oh gods, I beg you to deliver me from this task.
For a year I have been on guard
On the roof of the house of the sons of Atreus,
resting on my arms, in the manner of a dog.

Not poetry. Here's Carson:

Gods, free me from this grind!
It's one long year I'm waiting watching waiting--
propped on the roof of Atreus, chin in my paws like a dog

Energy, humor, the yawn of the watchman's boredom. We hear the wordplay of Aeschylus, the tough irony of Sophocles, and the perverse subversion of Euripides.

from John Timpane: Philadelpia Inquirer: Voices of the past, in shimmering new translations

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No Other Side
by Doug Payne

You die and find

from Kimberly Willson: CounterPunch: Poets' Basement: Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

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Written on the Wall at Chang's Hermitage
By Tu Fu

It is Spring in the mountains.

from Kimberly Willson: CounterPunch: Poets' Basement: Three Poems of Tu Fu

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One senses that the father has always taken the older son's dutifulness for granted, and that, perhaps, the older son has been so dutiful in order to win some greater measure of his father's love and approval. In other words, the family dynamics at work here do not seem at all simple and clear-cut.

I suspect that this parable, like a poem, means what it says precisely as it says it, and that to reduce it to a "message" is like "explicating" a poem by translating it into prose. It is, instead, one of those things we should think on, letting it sink into the well of our consciousness like a Zen koan, where it might bring about not merely an idea or a moral, but a radical change in outlook

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: Great teachers and infinite caprice

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by Assef Al-Jundi

How light can I get?

from Express-News: Poetry: 'Silly Romantic'

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As a youth, [John] Updike was an avid reader of “popular fiction, especially humor and mysteries,” according to his Academy of Achievement biography. His mother encouraged to him draw and write. He was president and covaledictorian of his class at Shillington High School and earned a tuition scholarship to Harvard University. There, he contributed stories and cartoons to the humor magazine The Harvard Lampoon, and spent summers working as a copy boy for the Reading Eagle. He met his first wife, Mary E. Pennington, at Harvard; they married before graduation in 1954.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Happy Birthday, John Updike, Prolific Novelist, Critic and Poet

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This poem makes clever use of the villanelle's power to make the same words sound new each time we hear them. The line about the lover's blue eyes is full of naughty double entendre in the second stanza, emotional vulnerability and pain in the fifth stanza, and sweet sincerity in the last stanza. There is a strong and subtle control of tone at work here, and a willingness to go through the kind of journey of discovery that a real poem can put us through.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: Love poems

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By Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Kerala, India

land snails the size of hockey pucks

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'By the Light of a Single Worm'

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by Paul Birtill

My dad finally came home from his travels

from Morning Star: Well Versed: Fifties

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by Lena Katina

The dark Danube is covered with

from MR Zine: Yugoslavia

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So, So It Begins Means It Begins
by Mary Jo Bang

from The New Yorker: Poetry: So, So It Begins Means It Begins

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When the Snake Became a Man
by Garret Keizer

from The New Yorker: Poetry: When the Snake Became a Man

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By Cornelius Eady

The furnace wheezes like a drenched lung.

from PBS: Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'Handymen'

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[by Leslie Morgan]

Spring sun, come lift the icy chill

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Spring sun, come lift the icy chill

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Elizabeth Smither is a poet of standing in her native New Zealand, and included in a new anthology of New Zealand poets from Carcanet. This poem is guaranteed to come into your mind on your next long beach walk. Learn it now, so you can take it with you.

The sea question

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Elizabeth Smither

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"The Age"
By Gail Mazur

from Slate: "The Age" --By Gail Mazur

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The first third or so of this poem was written 28 years ago, here in San Francisco, in the same apartment I'm in now. I was never quite happy with the rest of it and only recently figured out how I might complement those earlier lines. The "hook" or "event" precipitating the resurrection and completion of the poem was the--to me--strange phenomenon of the big black Google bus at the foot of the block every morning and evening, picking up Google employees, then dropping them off at night. The rest is, I hope, self-explanatory.

from The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Hollyhocks in the Fog by August Kleinzahler

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Poetic Obituaries

In more recent times [Lorri] Alexander, who was the President of the National Emancipation Trust, organised the Miss African Heritage pageant but he was forced to discontinue it a few years ago because of the lack of sponsorship. Last year during Carifesta he launched one of his four poetry books, the Moon Gazer, and his wife said he was very heartened when the book subsequently became part of the school curriculum.

from Stabroek News: Lorri Alexander passes away

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"With my many accomplishments I feel that I have demonstrated that women not only have a role in business, but also have the compassion, grit, and drive to excel in the workplace and community," [Helen] Bale wrote in the Oct. 4 column.

Helen Tierney was born Christmas Day 1920 and considered herself a native of West Paterson, New Jersey. She was only 4 years old when she earned her first paycheck for a four-line poem published in the local paper.

"This became my source of income throughout my childhood; I could count on at least 50 cents each week for either prose or poetry," Bale wrote.

from Auburn Journal: Longtime Journal columnist, former editor Bale passes

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Born in 1936 in Sivasagar district, Barthakur was among the acclaimed poet-lyricists of the State. He penned such immortal numbers as Sonar kharu nalage mok biyar babe aai and Aita tumi jerengar--both sung by the great singer Dipali Barthakur, who is his sister. Barthakur, in fact, is remembered most for the enduring combination that he had formed with Dipali Barthakur. His niece Sangeeta Barthakur also lent her voice to a number of his evergreen compositions.

from The Assam Tribune: Noted lyricist B Barthakur passes away

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[Margaret Carpenter Bauer] could write a poem, give a lesson, have a beautiful yard or bake a pie with equal ease. She was a beautiful seamstress. It seemed there was nothing she couldn't do with a sewing machine. She truly loved the out-of-doors as well. Working in her yard was one of her favorite things

from The Spectrum: Margaret Carpenter Bauer

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The perspective of the books of Catlettsburg, Ky., native son Billy C. Clark, have something to teach people today.

Growing up poor in eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression, Clark was on his own at 11 and working to put himself through school, living on the third floor of the courthouse building.

Clark, who was 80, the author of 11 books and many short stories and poems, died Sunday at his Farmdale, Va., home.

from The Herald-Dispatch: 'Appalachian Treasure' Billy C. Clark dies

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[Ruby Hartley's] death marks the end of an era for the Gazette's Letters Page, to which, over a 30-year period, Mrs. Hartley submitted hundreds of handwritten letters and poems.

Impassioned, thoughtful but always filled with warmth, her missives are sure to be missed by our readers.

from The Shields Gazette: Last word from Gazette stalwart Ruby, 95

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[J. Kline Hobbs] wrote plays for regional theaters, but said in a 1977 interview that few were interested in original works. However, he found work acting, directing and producing projects and publishing poetry and was, for a time, artist in residence at both Olivet College and Kalamazoo College and did some teaching.

from Battle Creek Enquirer: B.C. poet, playwright dead at 80

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[Nicholas Hughes] was only a baby when his mother [Sylvia Plath] died but she had already sketched out what he meant to her in one of her late poems.

In Nick and the Candlestick, published in her posthumous collection Ariel, she wrote: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious./You are the baby in the barn."

Later his father wrote of how, after Plath's death, their son's eyes "Became wet jewels,/The hardest substance of the purest pain/As I fed him in his high white chair". Neither he, nor his sister nor their Poet Laureate father could ever fully escape the shadow cast by Plath's suicide in 1963 and the personality cult that then sprang up around her memory.

from The Times: Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath's son commits suicide
also One Poet's Notes: Sylvia Plath and Nicholas Hughes: Mother and Son
also Daily News-Miner: Nicholas Hughes, son of major poets, emerged as prominent Alaska biologist
also Daily Mail: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's son commits suicide, 46 years after she gassed herself

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[Khudai Khidmatgar Muhammad Iqbal Iqbal, a.k.a. Babu,] was a staunch follower of Bacha Khan and he had returned the cheque sent to him by Ziaul Haq when he was in admitted to a hospital in Karachi. He was always using the word Pakhtunkhwa for the NWFP in his conversations, meetings and poetry. He was also the General Secretary of Ulasi Adabi Tolana (UAT), Mardan, which was organised by well-known poet and nationalist leader, Ajmal Khattak, about 36 years ago. He also wrote several dramas, songs for radio and PTV. His books 'Da Livala Muhabat, Da Rabab Tang' (poetry), 'Teli Pehrona'(shot story) and 'Palwasha' (poetry) have already been published.

from The News International: Noted poet Iqbal Iqbal passes away

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[Michael Elden Jones] also attended Ivy Tech and Ball State University.

Michael enjoyed studying films, listening to music, writing poetry, spending time with family and friends, traveling, golf, cars, motorcycles, dancing and gourmet cooking. He was a competitive body builder and a writer.

from The Star Press: Michael Elden Jones, 26

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John [Leech] was one of the rarest things in this world: a genuine philosophical Bohemian in the very best sense of the word who created an austere unpretentious Cafe which was, by his design, a magical safe zone for artists, musicians, poets, scientists, intellectuals and outsiders of all stripes . . .

. . . What was most unusual about him was that John had the backbone to truly stick up for freedom of expression and freedom of conscience while a fascist Reaganistic culture rampaged everywhere without.

from Los Angeles Metblogs: John Leech, founder of Onyx Cafe, passes away

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But from her [Jane Mayhall's] grief sprang a storm of poems, which became the foundation of "Sleeping Late on Judgment Day."

Reviewing the collection in The New York Times Book Review, Andy Brumer praised Ms. Mayhall's "love poems of excruciating honesty," commending their "philosophical insights into love and its inevitable loss."

Among the most striking of these is "The Gilded Shadow," here in its entirety:

from The New York Times: Jane Mayhall, Poet Who Gained Prominence Late in Life, Is Dead at 90

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While preparing for his funeral, Travis [Oaks]' small, close-knit family shares memories of the boy raised in Calgary, who was artistic, wrote poetry and had many friends, says his mom.

from Canoe: Man killed by cop called 'no monster'

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[Esther Royland] was a homemaker and also worked part-time for businesses, including Rainbow Lanes and the Forest Grove Church of Christ.

She enjoyed bowling, arts and crafts, the beach, and playing the organ. She was a poet and enjoyed reading and writing poetry.

from The Hillsboro Argus: Esther Royland, 88, service on Saturday

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The territory lost one of its most highly revered and spirited voices Tuesday with the passing of former Sen. Elmo D. Roebuck, politician, poet, storyteller extraordinaire, dancer, teacher, musician, friend.

from St. Thomas Source: Former Sen. Elmo D. Roebuck Dead at 74

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[Maeann C. Stevens] was a professional and amateur bassoonist, performing for philharmonics, orchestras and chamber groups.

She moved to New Hampshire in 2001 and was a member of the Writers Association. She was a gifted poet whose poetry is scheduled to be published. She was responsible for establishing the Warner Shape Note Singers.

from Concord Monitor: Maeann C. Stevens

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Edith [E. Vossekuil] had a very loving nature and enjoyed her role as housewife and mother. She was a faithful wife and dedicated mother who loved to cook and bake. Edith was a loving grandmother and great-grandmother who cherished precious time with her family. She was a poet who enjoyed writing poems about her children and grandchildren.

from Fond du Lac Reporter: Edith E. Vossekuil

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News at Eleven

Then, soon after his [Ly Van Aggadipo's] death last year, friends found a collection of the monk's poetry tucked under stacks of old Buddhist texts. On worn pages were handwritten, carefully crafted poems describing his memories of witnessing infant executions, starvation at labor camps

Now followers are seeking to publish the poetry, even as the discovery of this vivid historical record of the atrocities has reopened for many a painful time they still have not reconciled in their own lives.

from The Lowell Sun: In verse concealed, Lowell monk chronicled Khmer Rouge horrors

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And the parallels go further. Like Kafka, [Samuel] Beckett is always complaining of his body, as though the failure to write as he would like has a direct physical effect: his teeth are bad, his neck hurts, he has pleurisy, his feet are giving him hell. Like Kafka he is paralysed and bored. Acedia hangs heavily over him. And as Kafka blamed Prague, so Beckett blames Dublin: "This tired abstract anger--inarticulate passive opposition--always the same thing in Dublin". Kafka went to see Rudolf Steiner and Martin Buber, but the sages were no help; Beckett is psychoanalysed in London by Bion, and feels better for it, but soon confesses that it has changed nothing. Kafka travelled to Italy, Germany and France and dreamed of one day settling in Palestine, all to get away from his father; with his father dead, Beckett's mother grows more and more possessive, and getting away from Dublin becomes getting away from Mother.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Letters from Beckett

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[Ruth] Padel's vision also includes [Charles] Darwin's father, his sisters, his beloved and anxious wife Emma, his children, his fellow evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace, and even (of course) an orangutan in London Zoo: "She took bread from a visitor, tilting her brow/at the keeper, to see whether this was allowed."

The emotional centre of the book is the Darwins' stoic marriage, shaken by the divisive problem of Emma's religious belief, and torn by the terrible death of their 10-year-old daughter Annie. This is dramatised in a series of bleak and painful poems, most notably "The Devil's Chaplain", in which hopes of a Christian heaven are set against relentless phrases from chapter four of The Origin - "no purpose, no design . . . blind, pitiless/indifference".

from The Guardian: Giving to a blind man eyes

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Actually, [John] Balaban's translation of Ho Xuan Huong's poems helped many American readers understand the fate and strong response full of femininity of the Vietnamese women of the past. They were known for not only having virtues due to close ties to family education and principles, but also having strong characters. They dared to spell out the taboos of society such as sex and an intimate sexual life, etc., through poems which are pure, sensitive and graphic.

from Nhan Dan: Poet loves Vietnamese poems

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In Lorca y el mundo gay (Lorca and the Gay World), published in Spanish on Monday, [Ian] Gibson describes how the poet's works were censored to conceal his sexuality. It was not until the late 1980s that Lorca's sexual identity became grudgingly acknowledged, in the face of denials and evasions. Gibson blames the decades of silence on a deep-seated Spanish homophobia.

from The Independent: Lorca was censored to hide his sexuality, biographer reveals

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It was under these conditions that modern Kurdish poetry emerged. The first notable modern poet was Nûrî Sheikh Sâlih (1905-1958), who also brought the ideas of modernism to literary criticism. Because of increasing political involvement, however, Nûrî Sheikh Sâlih never really reached the influential and important position within Kurdish literature which he otherwise certainly would have attained.

The poet who undoubtedly brought about a revolution in Kurdish poetry, was Goran (1904-1962), also called the father of Kurdish modernism. At this time Kurdish poetry was loaded with hundreds of years of foreign heritage, especially Arabic. Goran cleared his poetry of this influence and gave it a form, rhythm, language and content which were based on Kurdish reality and Kurdish culture, nature and folkloric traditions.

from The Kurdish Globe: Classical and Modern Kurdish Poetry--Part III
also The Kurdish Globe: Classical and Modern Kurdish Poetry--Part I
also The Kurdish Globe: Classical and Modern Kurdish Poetry--Part II

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[Yevgenia] Savelyeva refused to recite the poems that were found extremist, citing fears that her telephone was bugged by law enforcement officers.

Poems posted on Savelyeva's blog, written under the nickname "nibaal," included one about shakhids, the term meaning "martyrs" that is often mistakenly used to describe Islamic suicide bombers. The poem, addressed to a shakhid, calls on them to "hold the detonator tight" and says they will die "heroes" of their motherland and go to paradise.

from The Moscow Times: Poet Found Guilty of Extremism

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Even more than his work, however, English students frequently took issue with [Christian] Bök's occasionally radical views on literature. During Thursday's panel discussion, he pulled no punches against other modern poets. Responding to Bök's claim that poetry hasn't progressed since the 50's, Arnold said, "I don't think you can really argue that poetry isn't modern if it's written today, in a modern voice, in a modern language."

Senior Mary Volk, also an English major, agreed. "It didn't seem like he cared about poetry in a traditional sense," she said. "Poetry needs to express something, and he wasn't really doing that." She acknowledged Bök's skill and virtuosity at his craft, but said that the craft was not poetry, but "parlor tricks."

from The Stentor: Noise, sound, or poetry? LFC reacts

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The poet's task is both to dramatize our most intimate and intense feelings, and at the same time give us a perspective on them. Stonington's great poet James Merrill once compared the process to sitting in your Honda while it goes through the car wash. Calmly inside, you watch a virtual storm of lashing torrents and winds. That's it exactly! [--J.D. McClatchy]

from The Day: Five Questions With J.D. McClatchy

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Deprivation taught the Mukarung family to manage with bare essentials. "We have trained ourselves to live in Kathmandu on 5,000 to 6,000 rupees a month," he said. That includes the rent of two rooms and a kitchen, schooling for his daughter and food for the family.

After having six published works in the market, [Shrawan] Mukarung is fully aware that publishers generally exploit writers.

"There is royalty of 40 percent to writers, but that is after deducting the cost of publishing and also after the distributor decides that he has stolen enough from the writer," he said.

from Republica: Poet who fought a despot

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The government eventually shored up agricultural lenders and streamlined the farm bankruptcy process. But the lifeline came too late for many families.

Now Washington is opening Treasury's vaults to kick-start the economy and stabilize financial institutions. The contrast in the speed of the federal response is stirring frustration on the range and enlivening poems. As [Yvonne] Hollenbeck says of her fellow ranchers:

"Stock Exchange" to them is to trade a horse or cow;
their market is the Sale Barn while on Wall Street it's the "Dow."
There's never been a program to bail out the livestock man;
when things get tough their motto is to "Hang on if you can!"

from Los Angeles Times: They're well-versed in hard times

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Great Regulars

So I'm asking if you would please make nominations for the Oregon State Library/"Poetry Northwest" Oregon 150 List of Poetry Books that are highly recommended for Oregonians to read. Send your nominations to editors@poetrynw.org in the following format: Name of Poet, Title of Book, Publisher, Year of Publication. With Jim's help, we'll have a list compiled for the people of Oregon in the coming months. For now, a poem from one book I'd recommend for the list, "Incredible Good Fortune" by Portland's Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Cactus Wren

from David Biespiel: The Oregonian: Bookmarks: Name your favorite poet for Oregon's 150th

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Here are three ventriloquized verses, tap-room utterances which amuse in simple ways (malapropisms, "phonetic" rendering of speech) but have a curious, collective emotional impact, too. Born in Liverpool in 1946, [Peter] Reading has been described as an "anti-romantic" poet; he is also perhaps one of the finest, most formally versatile poets of the late twentieth century. The TLS has been fortunate to be able to publish so much of his work.

Eavesdropped

from Michael Caines: The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: Eavesdropped

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Some philosophers thought that God's relationship with black folk had been especially worthy of equivocation. How could a kind, well-meaning God allow some of His children to be held in such low regard by so many of His other children?

But this speaker has a different take from those who want to equivocate about God. If God is so unjust with black folk, why would be allow "this curious thing:/To make a poet black, and bid him sing"?

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Cullen's Yet Do I Marvel

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In the opening quatrain of sonnet 122, the speaker declares that his gift of poetry, which is represented in tablets "full character'd," is also part of his "brain," that is, they abide "with lasting memory." He expands his memory's ability retain the love that inspired his works "even to eternity."

The speaker insists that the mental imprint of his poems will remain in his memory, even without his having the physical replicas in his presence.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 122

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The speaker understands that the nature of humankind includes the act of creation, which has no limits. From the creation of little songs, or sonnets, to the enormous ingenuity that brought forth the pyramids, there exists a constant stream of creativity.

The artist's work does not change with "Time" as other human activity does. The artist's creations result from the artist's self, because they are manifestations of the creative soul. While the physical body and even the mind may come under Time's sway, the soul does not.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 123

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The second verse paragraph grows into a chant: "You may hide behind the ocean,/You may hide behind delusion,/You may hide behind life." The speaker demonstrates in his refrain the nature of Maya delusion that hides the Blessed One from the speaker's sense awareness. It seems that the Divine is hiding everywhere, behind every form from the gemstones to the bodies of all humans.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's Breathe in Me

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So, P.N., put your formidable researching skills to better use and research one or several poems that demonstrate individual and societal complexities. Or simply go to U.S. Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan. I know, she's endorsed by the state, but I think her poems can help your work--they can at least offer a refreshing alternative to those dry academic papers you're reading, especially "The Fabric of Life," which realizes that nothing we have learned can, as you say, "pin human behavior down:"

It is very stretchy.

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: World View

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For both writers, the poetry came from God, but different ones. [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's was a Calvinist creation, [Flannery] O'Connor's a Roman Catholic one.

In his new biography, Brad Gooch focuses on O'Connor's deep-seated faith as the mainspring of her emotional and intellectual life. Writing on novelists of the 1950s, John Updike described O'Connor's fiction as "Christian orthodoxy eminently, provocatively represented." Her life was cut short by lupus: O'Connor died at 39 in 1964 after a 14-year battle with the same disease that killed her father when he was 45.

from Bob Hoover: The Philadelphia Inquirer: A writer who steered life toward poetry

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[James] Purdy published poetry, drawings, the plays "Children Is All" and "Enduring Zeal," the novels "Mourners Below" and "Narrow Rooms," and the collection "Moe's Villa and Other Stories." Much of his work fell out of print; several books were reissued in recent years. In the spring, Ivan Dee will issue a collection of his plays.

Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker were among his fans, but Purdy won few awards and was little known to the general public. He spent most of his latter years in a one-room Brooklyn walk-up apartment, bitterly outside what he called "the anesthetic, hypocritical, preppy and stagnant New York literary establishment."

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: James Purdy, author of underground classics, dies

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Adam's Curse
by William Butler Yeats

We sat together at one summer's end,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Adam's Curse by William Butler Yeats

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Cold Poem
by Jim Harrison

A cold has put me on the fritz, said Eugene O'Neill,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Cold Poem by Jim Harrison

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The Meaning of Life
by Nancy Fitzgerald

There is a moment just before

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Meaning of Life by Nancy Fitzgerald

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New York Notes
by Harvey Shapiro

1. Caught on a side street in heavy traffic, I said to the cabbie, I should have

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: New York Notes by Harvey Shapiro

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Ode on My Mother's Handwriting
by Barbara Hamby

Her a's are like small rolls warm from the oven, yeasty,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Ode on My Mother's Handwriting by Barbara Hamby

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Ode to the Potato
by Barbara Hamby

"They eat a lot of French fries here," my mother

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Ode to the Potato by Barbara Hamby

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Suburban Bison
by James Tate

Joshua and I had decided to go bowling.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Suburban Bison by James Tate

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People singing, not professionally but just singing for joy, it's a wonderful celebration of life. In this poem by Sebastian Matthews of North Carolina, a father and son happen upon a handful of men singing in a cafe, and are swept up into their pleasure and community.

Barbershop Quartet,
East Village Grille

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 207

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Especially when it comes to artists, we should think of Elizabethan portraits not as passport photos but as album art or book-jacket portraits.

And if we accept that these paintings were exercises in image-making--in 17th-century spin doctoring--then why not embrace the Cobbe painting? Even if Shakespeare didn't actually sit for it, this is probably how he, like any other literary figure of the time, preferred to imagine himself: aloof, sexy, mysterious. And, more to the point, this is how most of us would prefer to imagine him too.

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: Is That Really You, Sweet Prince?

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"That has given way now, thank goodness. Now the kinds of poetry being written are as diverse as the culture in which it is being written. This seems perfectly right and sensible to me. We seem to be becoming a more tolerant society in respect to what a poem might be. The challenge now is to help young people develop an appropriate language through which to explore particular kinds of writing rather than becoming too insular. There needs to be a doorway into poetry for everyone."

from Andrew Motion: News Shopper: Interview: Poet Laureate Andrew Motion

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I had always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. I saw his sense that "the world is out of joint" as vague and philosophical. He's a depressive, self-obsessed young man who can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading the play after my mother's death, I felt differently. Hamlet's moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn't know how to handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.

from Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: Hamlet's Not Depressed. He's Grieving
also Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: "Normal" vs. "Complicated" Grief
also Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: Dreaming of the Dead

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A ferocious playfulness and self-mockery characterizes the poem, supersaturating its incantational language: the meaning of "die" as orgasm, here bizarrely linked to a prelude of prayer; the tradition of preaching at the execution place; compact apothegms like "Wonder hinders love and hate" or "Hope went on the wheel of lust." Greville ultimately seems to relish letting his "conceit" go wild, then reining it in with terse moral formulas. That internal, psychological drama heightens the external drama of a sexual encounter that doesn't quite happen.

[Fulke Greville's] Caelica 56: "All My Senses, Like Beacon's Flame"

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: "All My Senses, Like Beacon's Flame"

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Michael Longley has said that he considers his nature writing to be his most political. Such writing doesn't colonise the landscape with opinion or ideology. It leaves it open for the reader. Persephone is a poem about spring. Perhaps it's also a parable about creativity, and the creator's need to lie fallow and be "numskulled" at times.

Etymology, of course, links hibernation and Hibernia (the Latin name for Ireland). One should be wary of opening too many skylights in a poem's delicate brain. But, in the shadow of recent events in Northern Ireland, Persephone seems to whisper to us that, although untimely snow and murderous frosts beset the northern spring, the promise of summer has not been abandoned.

Persephone

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Persephone

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Some seem unable to realise that the laureateship is not primarily an opportunity for personal advancement. Arguably, it's the reverse. I suspect that the laureate is much more like a sacrifice: a sort of Fisher King sent out to secure the health of poetry as a whole, often at real cost to his own work.

from Fiona Sampson: The Guardian: The next poet laureate has a hard act to follow

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Many years ago I found myself in a relationship that presented regular opportunities for outbursts of rage. I routinely availed myself of those opportunities until, one day, I just happened to notice that there wasn't anything pleasant about rage. Quite the contrary. It was awful. So I paused to consider why I was letting myself feel so bad and quickly realized that my anger had its source in a toxic combination of injury and impotence: I felt hurt and there really wasn't anything I could do about it. The rage was simply fuming over what I would do if there were anything I could do.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: What do we mean by 'happy'?

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Despite the "legend" that the manuscript was written in just three weeks, "the book actually had a much longer, bumpier journey from inspiration to publication, complete with multiple rewrites, repeated rejections and a dog who" reportedly ate the last bits.

[Paul] Marion told NPR, "Kerouac cultivated this myth that he was this spontaneous prose man, and that everything that he ever put down was never changed, and that's not true. He was really a supreme craftsman, and devoted to writing and the writing process."

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac, Beat Author of "On the Road"

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Fin by Michael Donaghy

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Fin by Michael Donaghy

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Decorum: A Study

by Alison Powell

A person could be at a loss. The width, spools and yardage, meringue

from Guernica: Poetry: Decorum: A Study

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By Peter Seymour

We shared ourselves

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'Forbidden'

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Civilization
by Carl Phillips

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Civilization

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The Foundation
by C.K. Williams

from The New Yorker: Poetry: The Foundation

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Mom as Fly
by Terese Svoboda

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Mom as Fly

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[by Stephen Sundin]

She said her area of Ireland was poorer

from The Oregonian: Poetry: In County Clare

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By Nathalie Handal

Maybe when you are ready for music

from PBS: Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'Brokenmusic'

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[by Christopher Saiauski while in Grade 1]

Green Berets

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Green Berets

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John Manson writes in Scots and English, and is one of the contributors to a vibrant new anthology of contemporary Scots and Gaelic poems from Dumfries and Galloway, Chuckies fir the Cairn. His translations into Scots have a distinctively clean, sparse eloquence which particularly suits this poem of loss.

San Martino Del Carso frae the Italian o Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970)

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: John Manson

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I read this poem at the ceremony commemorating the 200th anniversary of the United States Capitol and the restoration of the Statue of Freedom to the Capitol dome on October 23, 1993. It was first published in the Congressional Record of the same day. [--Rita Dove]

Lady Freedom Among Us

from The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: 'Lady Freedom Among Us'

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Poetic Obituaries

[Annie Doolittle Ballard] love to read poems, a lot of which she wrote herself.

from The Marion Star: Aunt will be missed

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Mrs. [Clara L.] Barnes was known for her sense of style, and enjoyed wearing pretty dresses and elaborate hats. Her favorite pastimes were writing poetry and singing.

She was a member of St. Philip's Baptist Church, Port Richmond, where she belonged to the Guiding Light Singers, Senior Choir and Missionary Society.

from Staten Island News: Clara Barnes

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[Justin Danchick] was a gifted writer who won a poetry contest as a child and took writing and psychology courses in college, he said. Later, he twice traveled to India to study with a guru named Amma, he said.

"He was on a quest to find contentment and spiritual ease; to quiet the demons," his father said. "He was very bright."

from Santa Cruz Sentinel: Justin Danchick, whose body was found in Aptos Creek, told friends he was an inch from the bridge

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Others called [Marc] Diab a hero who taught them "when you want something, you have to work for it and you should never give up."

The last page of Diab's large, colourful funeral program was reserved for three poems and songs written by the soldier himself.

"This is the time we fall hard onto shaken knees/Praying and begging the lord for a second chance," he writes in one entitled "The Moment."

"Veins awaken, yet pumping and heart full of tears/My life is so short in time, it only lasts a glance."

from CJFW Country 1031 FM: Trooper Marc Diab remembered as a lofty dreamer hoping for global peace

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Born a gardener, who spent a lifetime caring for flowers, he died without a single petal in his pocket.

That, you bet, readily passes off as a one-line tragedy.

This, in a way, is the story of my kumpadre, Javier "Abeng" Dizon, who will be interred in Olongapo City this morning.

Abeng, a village bard, has passed on without a single line of his recited masterpieces remembered.

from Philippine Daily Inquirer: Requiem for Abeng, secret sportsman, village poet

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The 40-year-old [Matthew Hilton-Watson] also worked on the Honors Program, helped organize a "Poetry Under the Stars" program to showcase foreign languages and took a group of students on an alternative spring break in Montreal, according to U-M Flint officials.

from Detroit Free Press: U-M Flint professor dies after collapsing in class

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Bill [Makey] was an avid reader, enjoying fiction and poetry. He successfully memorized many poems and would readily recite them for an audience. His favorite poet was Robert Service.

from The Siuslaw News: William H. Makey

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[Patricia Ruth Morse] enjoyed reading, doing crosswords, and dabbled in writing poetry. Those that knew her knew that being with her family and friends was the true joy that she adored. She also found comfort through her animals, Buddy Lewis and Mariah.

from The Lincoln County Record: Patricia Ruth Morse

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[Mary Pryor] taught English at MSUM for 27 years, retiring in 1992. She published several chapbooks of poetry.

Roland Dille, former MSUM president, described Pryor as an "occasional poet," meaning she wrote about things that happened to her and in her community.

"Almost anything that happened in Moorhead had a poem by her," he said.

from The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead: Retired professor, writer Mary Pryor dies

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[James Purdy's] nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes.

"I can describe my books as I see them as American, imaginative, symbolic," he told an interviewer for the reference work World Authors.

from The New York Times: James Purdy, Darkly Comic Writer, Dies at 94

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[Guen Smith] also wrote weekly articles for the local newspaper and contributed articles to the Salt Lake Tribune. Guen was a prolific writer and wrote beautiful poems, stories and music.

from San Juan Record: Guen Lyman Smith

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In prison Daud [Turki] led hunger strikes of prisoners to win basic rights but when a policewoman greeted him normally with "Good Morning" he wrote her a poem. I don't think there is another prisoner anywhere who wrote a poem to a prison warden.

Daud was freed after 12 years in prison by the prisoner-exchange deal with Ahmed Gibril in 1984. He returned to his home in Wadi Nisnas in Haifa and continued to write revolutionary poetry which was broadcast by the "Voice of the People" Communist Radio station in Lebanon.

from Alternative Information Center: Euolgy to Daud Turki

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In 1959 she [Blanca Varela] published her first volume of poetry, "Ese puerto existe," followed in 1963 by "Luz de dia" and in 1971 by "Valses y otras confesiones."

Varela was honored in 2007 with Spain's Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry.

She had also been awarded the Octavio Paz Prize in Poetry and Essay in 2001 and was the first woman to win the Federico Garcia Lorca City of Granada International Poetry Prize in 2006.

from Latin American Herald Tribune: Peruvian Poet Blanca Varela Dies

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[James Whitmore] was an idiotic cavalry officer in Waterhole Three (1967) and mixed comic roles with more serious parts, as in the doom-laden cavalry Western, Chuka (1967), and a tough cop film, Madigan (1968), which later became a television series (without Whitmore). He also donned a monkey skin as an elder in Planet of the Apes (1968), and went to sea as Admiral Halsey in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970).

On stage he impersonated the poet Walt Whitman in a dramatic reading at Garden City, New York, and played an attorney again in Inquest, a play on Broadway about the atomic spies the Rosenbergs.

from Telegraph: James Whitmore

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News at Eleven

When China's leading intellectuals boldly launched their 'Charter 08' in December 2008 calling for political reform, Woeser was the only Tibetan to sign the Charter amongst the original 300 prominent Chinese signatories. During last November's Asia-Europe Summit in Beijing, Woeser was placed under house arrest again and this is likely to be repeated this year during 2009's "sensitive" anniversary periods such as 10th March 2009--50 years since the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and 4th June 2009--the 20 year anniversary of Tiananmen.

First and foremost a poet and writer, now a new volume of translations of Woeser's poetry is available to English readers thanks to the efforts of scholar and translator A.E. Clark. Tibet's True Heart, published by Ragged Banner Press, brings together original translations of 42 poems written by Woeser spanning a period of 20 years.

from The Comment Factory: Woeser, Tibet's most famous poet and intellectual dissident, is now available in English translation and should be read by all freethinkers

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Beyond business and investment, Dubai has uniquely situated itself to create new literary leanings and revive the tradition of poetry in the Arabian Peninsula through the currently Dubai International Festival: One Thousand Poets, One Language. With an international open cultural scene, Dubai has embraced poetry from world literatures in a phenomenon described by poets as "a giant stride in the history of poetry." The festival, the brainchild of the Muhammad Bin Rashid Foundation, seeks to achieve literary intercultural dialogue, organizers say. The Festival has come to make poetry connect world’s cultures in and enrich "the poetic and cultural life," they say.

from Saudi Gazette: Dubai Poetry Festival: New ground for world literature

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Poetry is the apex of culture, the spire of civilisations. It is the scalpel of emotion and the anvil of thought. It whispers and it bellows the unsayable with mere words.

How does it manage that? You can't teach being a poet, you can't train to be one. I was once a judge in a poetry competition, and I can't tell you how many people who aren't poets write it.

from The Sunday Times: Poetry is the cornerstone of civilisation

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Nor is he the poet who loved only one woman, Beatrice; here we have him burning in pain for an unidentified lover--or would-be lover: "My rash soul, working to its own destruction,/Depicts her as she is,/Shapes its own pain, this image fierce and fair . . ." He could, actually, be writing about Florence--we are informed, in the notes, that the poem was written in exile, and was probably the last one he completed before he rolled his sleeves up to start on the Commedia--but it also works if you assume he is writing about a woman he can't help but love, but who doesn't care about him (the situation has been known to arise, after all).

from The Guardian: Dante's surprising rhymes

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I recall a poem of his [Michael Donaghy's] called 'Riddle'--a poem I'd already committed to memory, and was reciting in my head again one day, just for the noise of it. When the answer suddenly hit me, my heart was thumping in my throat. "I am the book you'll never read--but carry forever--one blunt page garlanded--by daughter or lover--You already know two-thirds by heart--and I'm passing weighty for a work so short." I won't spoil it for you, but I'll tell you this much: when you've got the answer, you'll know it, and something in the world won't look quite the same again.

from Scotland on Sunday: Collected Poems: The Shape of the Dance by Michael Donaghy

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[Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns] are extraordinarily scrupulous. On the Italian journey that was so important to [John] Milton in his late twenties they record: "It was long thought that Milton visited the Svogliati in the palace of Jacopo Gaddi in Piazza Madonna, but the census of 1632 places Iacopo Gaddi e fratelli a few yards away in the family's new palazzo in Via del Giglio, in the building that is now the Hotel Astoria". Such attention to detail comes only from love of one's subject. The reader is left in little doubt that on their next trip to Florence Professors Campbell and Corns will book into the Astoria as an act of homage.

from The Times Literary Supplement: The power of Milton

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One could easily rearrange lines 6-8, adding just one more little preposition to form a conventionally reasonable sentence or clause that would function as an expanded parallelism with the two constructions that make up line 5--"and in a silver and golden portrait by Pinturicchio we permanently taste the dark grapes and the seed pearls glisten"--but how much would be lost thereby: the energy of movement that constructs "an instant of vision" out of many such instants. And notice what [Barbara] Guest gains by playing this coiled syntax off against her line breaks: telling enjambments like "taste the dark/grapes" and "coupling mind/and heart"--reminding us that when mind and heart are joined, they join dissimilar things in poetic vision.

from The Nation: Ceaselessly Opportuning: On Barbara Guest

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It was late afternoon, and [Stephen] Spender was sitting away from any lamp. "Can you remind me please of the poem's last lines?" he asked me. So I read aloud the half-tragic, half-affirmative answer to the poem's initial question: "For the world is the world/And not the slain/Nor the slayer, forgive,/Nor do wild shores/Of passionate histories/Close on endless love;/Though hidden under seas/Of chafing despair,/Love's need does not cease."

"That is rather good, isn't it?" he said, the only time in two decades I ever heard him express anything like satisfaction with what he had written.

from The Independent: Angel of the Left: Paul Binding recalls his friendship with Stephen Spender

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Why read poetry? Because of its exquisite (often witty) distillation of feelings and experience, its high-wire acts, incantatory power and chiseled truths. Because of its embrace of paradox, ambiguity and awe.

All this and more are found in [Michelle] Boisseau's arresting and liberating book, the work of a clarifying poet of the tectonic and the ephemeral, of shame and catharsis, sass and joy.

Sandcastle Guarded by a Cicada Shell

The rowboat is slapped by the harried lake.

from Kansas City Star: Michelle Boisseau's A Sunday in God-Years

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Then he [Christopher Reid] recurs to the final few days, telling it as straight as he can, refusing, for instance, to invest the disease that kills her with anything like human moral agency:

Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend;
nor even the jobsworth slob
with a slow, sly scheme to rob
my darling of her mind
that I imagined;
just a tumour.

from The Guardian: One step ahead

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[Christian] Bök describes how the poem will be encoded:

The poem can be most easily encoded by assigning a short, unique sequence of nucleotides to each letter of the alphabet, as Wong has done. But I want my poem to cause the organism to make a protein in response--a protein that also encodes a poem. I am striving to engineer a life form that becomes a durable archive for storing a poem, and a machine for writing a poem--a poem that can survive forever.

from Techonolgy Review: TR Editors' blog: Poetry Written in DNA

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Great Regulars

I felt extremely unlikely. I didn't think it would ever happen. Usually the laureates are chosen from among the academic classes. I'm academic in the sense that I teach and have taught remedial writing skills for 33 years. But that isn't usually the group from whom the laureate is selected.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: More Than a Weekly Poem: A Conversation and Reading With Poet Laureate Kay Ryan

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And just when the speaker begins to achieve genuine poetic value in the two strongest lines in the work, "Love beyond marital, filial, national,/love that casts a widening pool of light," she destroys the achievement with discord in the line, "love with no need to pre-empt grievance." Not pre-empting grievance allows grievance to worsen. The "widening pool of light" dries up in political posturing.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Alexander's Praise Song for the Day

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He desires the green grass and the sounds of rivers moving naturally through the landscape.

The speaker issues forth the Romantic sensibility of yearning for "Nature's observatory," from which "the dell,/Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell." He craves to reside among the flowers and clear river on a hillside, instead of living in a shabby city apartment.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Keats' O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell

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The speaker proclaims his idea that it is better to be a bad person than to be merely thought to be bad by others who do not really know. If gossiping busybodies contend that the target of their gossip is other then he actually is, the latter might feel it incumbent upon himself to change his behavior to suit the gossipers.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 121

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This statement reminds readers that the mind is a private place in which one can retreat for reflection and also where one can create original ideas for entertainment, education, or enlightenment. This unique quality of the mind is available to every living individual; every human being is born equipped with this remarkable vehicle.

The speaker then reveals that he especially prefers the "streets untrod by crooked thoughts," which are "vile-born" and "unkind."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's The Human Mind

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Having occupied Tibet, the Chinese Communist government carried out a series of repressive and violent campaigns that have included "democratic" reform, class struggle, communes, the Cultural Revolution, the imposition of martial law, and more recently the patriotic re-education and the strike hard campaigns. These thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth. The immediate result of these campaigns was the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. The lineage of the Buddha Dharma was severed. Thousands of religious and cultural centres such as monasteries, nunneries and temples were razed to the ground. Historical buildings and monuments were demolished. Natural resources have been indiscriminately exploited. Today, Tibet's fragile environment has been polluted, massive deforestation has been carried out and wildlife, such as wild yaks and Tibetan antelopes, are being driven to extinction.

These 50 years have brought untold suffering and destruction to the land and people of Tibet.

from Tenzin Gyatso: The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: March 10th Statement of H.H. the Dalai Lama

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With its change to a Web-only feature, Poet's Choice is evolving. We'll be asking a different poet each week to share with us a poem he or she has written. Mary Karr, who has been our eloquent columnist since March 2008, starts us off on this new format.--The Editors

The heartbroken so often write poetry, but there's damn little in poetic history about heartbreak's recovery. For me it's a spiritual process in which I reconnect with the human family, and that's done through prayer. I also adore reading small, intensely morbid stories by Isaac Babel. "Konkin" opens with a group of Red Cavalry soldiers chopping up Poles, then "hugging each other with hatchets." Such were my starting points when I wrote this poem.

Recuperation from the Sunk Love Through the Aegis of Christ and Isaac Babel

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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Bees
by Jane Hirshfield

In every instant, two gates.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Bees by Jane Hirshfield

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Happiness
by Robert Hass

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Happiness by Robert Hass

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If She Could Have Her Love For You Only One Day A Year
by Tina Kelley

If life bloomed once a year, if we sat in dim rooms the rest of the days, resting,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: If She Could Have Her Love For You Only One Day A Year by Tina Kelley

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In the Coffee Shop
by Carl Dennis

The big smile the waitress gives you

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: In the Coffee Shop by Carl Dennis

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Making the Best of the Holidays
by James Tate

Justine called on Christmas day to say she

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Making the Best of the Holidays by James Tate

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The Pleasures of Hating
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

I hate Mozart. Hate him with that healthy

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Pleasures of Hating by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

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Trains
by David Shumate

I am seduced by trains. When one moans in the night like some

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Trains by David Shumate

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[Seamus] Heaney is in obvious ways unlike [Thomas] Mann's Apollonian aesthete, but he too has managed to win the love of the many and the esteem of the few, in a way that no American poet since Frost has managed. As Heaney observes in this important book-length interview, designed to serve in lieu of a memoir, "In the United States, there's a great crop of ripe, waving poetry--but there's no monster hogweed sticking up out of it."

from Adam Kirsch: Powells: Review-A-Day: In The Word-Hoard

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Ah, yes, the mid-life crisis. And there's a lot of mid-life in which it can happen. Jerry Lee Lewis sang of it so well in "He's thirty-nine and holding, holding everything he can." And here's a fine poem by Matthew Vetter, portraying just such a man.

Wild Flowers

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 206

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"Married to a Cowboy" refers to the cruder aspects of a cowboy life--fondness for chewing tobacco and lack of personal hygiene. Like most cowboy poems, it is a long narrative, so this is an excerpt. [Jack] DeWerff's narrator disarms his listener with self-deprecating humor--he anticipates criticisms and admits to them. This is a typical Kansas ploy to smooth relationships, and here a husband attempts to placate a wife. He also asserts the golden qualities of the cowboy character--honesty and loyalty.

Married to a Cowboy

from Denise Low: Lawrence Journal-World: Ad Astra Poetry Project: Cowboy poet feels at home on the range

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When times are hard and the outlook horrific, feast upon the rich imagery of positive poetry.

Read the epics and the classics of world literature that show humanity's tremendous resilience and our ability to survive the worst possible conditions of life. If nothing else, this should help put our social problems into perspective. Romantic English poet John Keats (1795-1821) expressed this same idea in his sonnet, "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be":

from Anthony Maulucci: Norwich Bulletin: On Poetry: Poetry can help heal us during hard economic times

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The poem about seasickness (and, of course, love), A Channel Passage, ends with the awkwardly comical, even comically awkward, couplet: "And still the sick ship rolls. It's hard, I tell ye,/To choose 'twixt love and nausea, heart and belly." [Rupert] Brooke's risky, and badly handled, honesty to experience is a mature virtue in the making. It's a quality worlds away from sentimentality and jingoism, and would have made him into a different and far more considerable writer than the one we remember.

Heaven

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week

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From the White House to our house, from Hollywood to the halls of Congress, suddenly everyone is "tweeting" on Twitter--and wants you to know it.

The free social-networking Web site is the new bling of the communication age. Celebs, pols, and millions more--even those who shun the Web--are scrambling to master it. This is Twitter's moment as symbol of status, popularity, and power. And no one wants to be left out.

from John Timpane: Philadelpia Inquirer: All a-Twitter: The Tweet smell of success

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Lysistrata, immortalized by Aristophanes, mobilized women on both sides of the Athenian-Spartan War for a sexual strike in order to force men to end hostilities and avert mutual annihilation. In this, Lysistrata and her co-strikers were forerunners of the American humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow who proposed a hierarchy of needs: water, food, shelter, and sexual relations being the foundation.

from René Wadlow: Newropeans Magazine: March 8: International Day of Women--Woman as Peacemakers

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I can't say that I take all this dire grousing about the decline in reading all that seriously. Doesn't anyone remember that, when they were in high school--and I was in high school half a century ago--the kids who read a lot were … in a minority? This idea that, not so many years ago, everybody, including kids, were reading up a storm is fantasy, as is the idea that young people nowadays don't read as much as young people used to.

from Frank Wilson: Conversations in the Book Trade: Frank Wilson--editor, critic (The Philadelphia Inquirer [retired])

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Rules are perfectly serviceable as guideposts, but can easily keep one from exploring the hinterlands of life and the imagination. It is precisely because the master craftsman knows the rules so well that he knows when to forego them. The saint is too absorbed in the pursuit of love to worry much about sin. In art, a preoccupation with rules leads to mannerism. Puritanism is the mannerism of religion.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: Look at the moon, not at the finger

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by David Yezzi

False Fire

The players withdraw in rain,

from The Atlantic Monthly: Poetry: False Fire

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by Wyatt Prunty

Memory

When I was twelve years old I climbed into

from The Atlantic Monthly: Poetry: Memory

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Ginger, A Novelized Memoir in Progress--
Comments and Other Confusing Advice From the Editor

by Guillermo Castro

Preliminary Notes

(1)

As the story begins in your head it needs to happen outside your head too.

from The Brooklyn Rail: Ginger, A Novelized Memoir in Progress

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Life Sentences

by Elizabeth Fodaski

The short weekend began with longing

from The Brooklyn Rail: Life Sentences

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By Josie Mixon

When I am feeble old and gray

from Express-News: Poetry: 'Fade Away'

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Reading in Bed by Diana Hendry

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Reading in Bed by Diana Hendry

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In the first of a series of collaborations between poets and photographers, Sarah Maguire and Martin Argles present an illustrated performance of her poem, 'My Father's Piano'

from The Guardian: Audio slideshow: 'Sounding-board of thought and feeling'

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By Iris Appelquist

whatever long lost and forgotten

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'November Thirty'

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by David Floyd

At school today

from Morning Star: Well Versed: War in the Playground

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Grater

by Aleš Šteger

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Grater

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Michael McGriff was born and raised in Coos Bay. He is the author of "Choke" (Traprock Books, 2006) and "Dismantling the Hills" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), in which "Mercy, Tear It Down" appears.

from The Oregonian: Poetry: Mercy, Tear It Down

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[by Isabel E. Grasso]

A Flight Plan for the Birds

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: A Flight Plan for the Birds

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Sheenagh Pugh's collection Long-Haul Travellers is full of stories of literal journeys and exploration, as well as journeys of the imagination.

The Door to the Sea

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: The Door to the Sea

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"Bad Infinity"
By T.R. Hummer

from Slate: "Bad Infinity" --By T.R. Hummer

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Reading a Swedish Poet

by Lou Lipsitz

This man, Werner Aspenstrom, was born

from The Sun Magazine: Poetry: Reading a Swedish Poet

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Poetic Obituaries

[William W. "Bill" Akers] was an avid reader and student of history and politics and had a broad range of cultural interests, ranging from the TV show "Hee Haw" to classical music and grand opera, to baseball.

During his retirement years he served as a volunteer driver for the Santa Cruz County Volunteer Centers and a volunteer aide at the Aptos library. He pursued hobbies of drawing with pastels and writing poetry, which, he said, "escaped being doggerel by the thinnest of margins."

from Santa Cruz Sentinel: Longtime local newspaperman William Akers dies at 88

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Singer-composer Zubir Ali died at Damansara Specialist Hospital at 10.30am Friday from complications after a heart surgery. He was 60.

The former member of folk band Harmoni whose hits included Penantian and Balada Seorang Gadis Kecil underwent heart bypass a week ago.

from The Star: Singer-composer Zubir Ali dies

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[Gloria Almack] also wrote a poem for a book for the Millersburg High School band about Otto Elliot's years as band director. She was a member of the Red Hat Society and was a foster grandparent at Killbuck Elementary School.

She was a member of Killbuck Church of Christ, where she sang in the choir.

from The Budget: Gloria Almack

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After retirement [W.] Ray [Dunn] remained active through volunteer work, preparing tax returns for senior citizens and helping local residents apply for home owner's and renter's assistance. A prolific poet and artist, it was Ray's great joy to facilitate a writer's group through the Salvation Army where he encouraged many to record the stories of their lives.

from Red Bluff Daily News: W. Ray Dunn

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Equally at home writing for the stage, film or television, [Horton] Foote quietly excelled in a career that lasted nearly 70 years. His first big TV script, The Trip to Bountiful, had an ongoing life as a play and a movie. Two of his most notable screenplays were To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. He won Academy Awards for both.

He later won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for drama for "The Young Man from Atlanta," and he continued to work right up to the end.

from WFAA-TV: Texas playwright, screenwriter Horton Foote dies

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[Stephanie Dawn Hamilton] was employed at area restaurants and was a blessing to all who knew her. Her true talent was singing and writing poetry.

from Zanesville Times Recorder: Stephanie Dawn Hamilton

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[Yusuf] Hayalo?lu, whose works were marked by political undertones as well as lyrical depictions of love, was the writer of hundreds of poems which were turned into well-known protest songs, most notably those by Kaya. Among his best-known lyrics are "Hani Benim Gençli?im" (Where's My Youth?), "Ba??m Belada" (I'm in Trouble), "Ad? Bahtiyar" (His Name Was Bahtiyar), "Ba?kald?r?yorum" (Rising Up), "Ayr?l???n Hediyesi" (The Gift of Separation) and "Yüre?im Kan?yor" (My Heart's Bleeding), among others.

from Today's Zaman: Poet Yusuf Hayalo?lu dies at age 56

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The American University of Beirut (AUB), the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Arabic Language and Literature announced Tuesday the passing of Mohammad Yusuf Najm, Professor Emeritus of Arabic at AUB. "Known for his grace, elegance and sharp sense of humor, Najm was a professor for over 50 years, teaching Arabic literature to students at AUB for over 25 years, as well as to students at Harvard University in 1972 and at Kuwait University in 1969," the university statement said.

from The Daily Star: Veteran professor Mohammad Yusuf Najm passes away

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[Salvador Becquer] Puig, who was born on Jan. 9, 1939, in the capital, was a successful writer whose work was recognized with the Bartolome Hidalgo Prize for "Si tuviera que apostar" and the Juan Jose Morosoli Prize for his body of work.

Among his works were "La luz entre nosotros" (1963), "Apalabrar" (1980), "En un lugar o en otro" (2003) and "Escritorio" (2006).

from Latin American Herald Tribune: Uruguayan Poet and Journalist Salvador Becquer Puig Passes Away

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[Yadvendra Sharma] had authored over 100 books, including 60 novels, 30 short stories, poems, and short plays.

His literary works fetched him Rajasthan Sahitya Academy's top literary "Meera award", Kendriya Sahitya Academy award, Rajasthani Bhasha Sahitya Academy award, Rajasthan Patrika's literary award, Sahitya Mahopadhya, Vidhya Vachaspati, Sahitya Shree, Rahul Sankratyan, and Jhabarmal Sharma awards.

from Business Standard: Noted Hindi writer Yadvendra Sharma passes away

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Most of her [Loyce "Hump" Sheppard's] years with the system were spent at Towers High School and the last were at Redan High School, which she left in 1998, said her son, Donnie Sheppard of Hall County.

She was a poet who loved flowers, garage sales, country music and family trips to Florida.

And she loved her work, her son said, leaving Redan High School only after hip pain prevented her from working any longer.

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Loyce Sheppard, 94, loved cafeteria work

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It is easy to pass judgment on the guards who were on duty when [Ashley] Smith died or to blame Smith herself. As Canadians, we need to get involved, become informed, and become part of the solution rather than silent bystanders. Crime affects us all.

We need to understand and participate in our system of justice in our great nation to ensure it reflects our values and effectively addresses our collective need for safety. Consider Smith's poem when you think of how things could have been done differently.

My Life

from The Record: A preventable death

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A funeral was held Tuesday for Jim Thomas, a longtime professor at Truman State University. He had died Friday in his Hermann home after a long illness.

Missouri Poet Laureate had featured Mr. Thomas just about a month ago in his column for the Post-Dispatch. I am re-posting it here. The poem is a lively, clever piece that quickly conveys the different tone of the small-town schools of many decades ago:

from The Post-Dispatch: Funeral held for poet, retired teacher Jim Thomas

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"Trova invented this great symbol of human fallibility through processing and reprocessing the image," [Matt] Strauss said.

In later years, Mr. [Ernest] Trova created abstract constructivist sculptures which failed to get much attention outside the St. Louis area.

Mr. Trova was born in St. Louis in 1927, and he never lived anywhere else. As an artist he was self-taught, and he was interested in music and poetry as well as in visual art.

from St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Ernest Trova Dies

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In 1952, as he was in Paris, Keng Vannsak had strongly criticised Norodom Sihanouk who had just granted himself extraordinary powers and had launched a "Royal Crusade" as a response to troubles caused by Son Ngoc Than and his followers. The exiled teacher wrote a series of poems and published them in 1954 under the title "Coeur Vierge" (Virgin Heart), in which he "used Buddhist metaphors to launch encrypted attacks against the monarchy", Philip Short observes, adding that the intellectual became, from then on, one of Norodom Sihanouk's "bêtes noires". Under his regime, Keng Vannsak was sent twice to prison.

from Ka-set: Death of Keng Vannsak: an intellectual who left a deep imprint on Cambodians

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Joyce [G. White] also wrote many poems and stories about her family and her church family and enjoyed going out to dinner with her husband every week.

from The Daily Times: Joyce G. White

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News at Eleven

There is nothing in Dorothy [Wordsworth]'s writing to suggest that from girlhood she seemed destined to live like "a sterile bud"; on the contrary, she comes across as someone who responds to her physical environment with open arms, someone acutely alert to the pleasures of the senses, who wants nothing more than to love and be loved in a home of her own. The problem with Dorothy Wordsworth is not, I suggest, that she did not experience or excite desire but that the idea of her doing so makes her readers so uncomfortable.

from The New York Times: First Chapter: 'The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth'

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The mysteries about Dorothy [Wordsworth] start with her appearance. No images of her as a young woman are extant. She was short, we know, and thin. Coleridge said of her, wonderfully: "If you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary--if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty."

What's filtered down to us is a certain fiery yet ethereal spirit. In his poem "Tintern Abbey," her brother praised "the shooting lights" of her "wild eyes." Thomas de Quincey saw something of the "gipsy" in her, and called her the "very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known."

from The New York Times: A Brother's Keeper: The Other Wordsworth

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After Ceret, Soutine became a more traditional painter. His portraits and still-lifes of the 1920s, however, represent the peak of his achievement. In these years, he turned against his Ceret breakthrough and destroyed as many of the paintings as he could find. When someone wanted to buy a new painting, in the 1930s, I have read, he insisted on them giving him a Ceret canvas to destroy in exchange.

In poetry, Soutine's Ceret period is very sympathetic with Cesar Vallejo's Trilce (most of which was written, in Peru, during the same years).

"Soutine at L'Orangerie"

from Bookslut: "Soutine at L'Orangerie": A Poem

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On the personal end I want my cane returned, or its worth to me in thousands of dollars. Likewise I want a new megaphone. I want torturers in both the jail and St. Rose hospital fired. The same Justice should be visited on ill trained ambulance and firemen paramedics who cannot decipher an attack from a hangover. Also my ransom money payed for the release of my vehicle returned to me, along with my attorney's fees. Moreover I want my dignity and compensation for the violation of my religious, civil and human rights, which were trampled upon when I was made nude against my will. I demand compensation for pain and suffering, for insult to injury-for being brutalized - falsely persecuted and prosecuted by law enforcement- and finally for being misdiagnosed by hospital staff while being denied treatment and harassed and berated by paramedics from Hayward city firemen and AMR paramedics. [--Raul (Curly) Estremera]

from Indybay: Police Torture Activist & Poet, Raul (Curly) Estremera

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[Stephen Spender's] faith in culture--in the "truly great", as the phrase from his famous poem has it--has more than a trace of his German, and specifically German-Jewish, background. The German Jews had embraced Kultur virtually as a passport to legal emancipation and civil rights, obtained by 1871, and to ultimate acceptance in German society, in which they were to be brutally disenchanted.

Many of Spender's best-known poems were written in Germany; it could be argued that his poetry generally declined after 1933, when it was no longer safe for him to live there, and he turned increasingly to prose.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Stephen Spender's Jewish roots

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A Hope for Poetry, published three-quarters of a century ago, had an extraordinary impact. Day Lewis's assertion that poets (and, in particular, himself and his colleagues WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice) had a prominent role to play in articulating the pressing challenges of economic recession and rising unemployment ran to six editions in the years up to the second world war, three more before 1945 and was still being reprinted in the mid-1970s. A few months after it came out, the Evening Standard reported on a meeting between TE Lawrence and Winston Churchill. They were bemoaning the state of Britain when Lawrence remarked that he had been reading a book by "the one great man in these lands - his name is Cecil Day Lewis".

Today it seems extraordinary that so much hope could be invested in poetry.

from The Guardian: Sacred indignation

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Rather than killing it off, modern technologies like email, social networking sites such as Facebook and online media players are helping poets reach new audiences.

The grassroots scene is now growing, with live poetry readings becoming more popular and more poets getting their own pamphlets published.

Competitions are also booming: the number of entries for the Foyle Young Poets Award more than doubling from 2003 to 2008 to almost 12,000.

from Telegraph: Internet 'is causing poetry boom'

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[Michael Rosen] said he was incensed when his seven-year-old daughter brought home a worksheet requiring her to read a short extract from the Greek myth Perseus and the Gorgon, and then answer 20 questions on it.

'That was the homework, that's what they did on myths that term,' he told a conference hosted by the charity Booktrust.

'How crazy, and absurd and poverty-stricken and pathetic is that? It had nothing to do with the story.'

from Daily Mail: Schools are teaching 'literacy without books' in 'poverty-stricken' lessons, says Children's Laureate

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"The crowds in London once stood on their toes to see Tennyson pass," Joseph Epstein wrote. Today, however, a figure like Tennyson probably would not write poetry and might not even read it. Poetry has been shifted—has shifted itself?—off center stage. Literarily, poetry no longer seems in any way where the action is. But might there not be some good and serious poets out there, amidst the careerists? Poetry's appeal to its creators and to its audience is potentially so strong that there will always be those who will try to achieve something great in verse, difficult though it is. Some are surely trying now, and one or two may even be succeeding. But how would we know?

from The American Spectator: Poets Galore and Subsidized Poets

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Montclair has made a serious bid to partner with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to save the biennial Dodge Poetry Festival, a four-day event that attracts high- profile poets and tens of thousands of poetry lovers.

Montclair Township manager Joseph Hartnett wants to present the 2010 festival in Montclair's central business district, which includes several performance spaces and church halls as well as restau rants and parking.

from Star-Ledger: Montclair steps in for sake of poetry

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The Tober Collection has extensive materials on famous forgers such as Thomas Chatterton, an 18th century teenager who wrote poems that he claimed were lost works of a 15th century monk, AND 19th-century forgers Thomas J. Wise and H. BuxtonForman, who used their knowledge of the printing process to forge and offer for sale 50 pieces of British poetry and literature. THERE ARE ALSO secondary historical, critical, and reference material on forgery from all periods, as well as material on imaginary voyages, counterfeiting, forensics, and the technology of forgery detection.

from The Smithsonian: Libraries' Surprising Special Collections

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Great Regulars

There is perfect order of the sequence: wonder when the bride arrives; mystery and solemnity in the religious service where the choristers sing the joyous anthems; Dionysian jollity in the feast; poignancy in the bridegroom's longing when he can come unto his love; serenity at the close in "the safety of our joy"; and the final hope of a large posterity.

from Bhaskar Banerjee: Merinews: The finest of bridal songs ever: Epithalamion

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Where unassuming forgiveness exists, there exists wisdom. As in the lake full of water lotuses grow, or as prosperity grows in the homes of the fortunate, so does forgiveness grow ever more in the man of wisdom (Jnana). He puts up with everything that happens with the same enthusiasm. (As a man shows in wearing new garments made to his special liking).

from Bhaskar Banerjee: Merinews: Forgiveness and compassion

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Before he turned to teaching, Bob [Hicock] owned and ran a successful automotive die design business in Michigan. There are others--Phillip Levine, whose poems continue to return to his native Detroit, and Theodore Roethke, whose imagination grew out of his father's greenhouse in Saginaw. I could go on. "Let us all be from somewhere," says Hicock's poem. But, as the great poet Richard Hugo says, a poet must then switch allegiance from the triggering subject to the words themselves.

A Primer

from Fleda Brown: Traverse City Record-Eagle: On Poetry: We all come from somewhere

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In this poem, [David] Constantine sets commonplace humanity against obdurate divinity, and finds decisively in favour of the former.

His delight in the human is conveyed more clearly still, perhaps, through the relish of his physical descriptions. An unashamedly carnal series of poems on women delicately sidesteps the pitfall of reductiveness by evoking beauty suggestively, through natural imagery: a new husband flames at the sight of his wife "pouring/The torrent of her hair in the light of hearth and home"; the protagonist of "Woman on a Swing" moves langorously back and forth against the luminous backdrop of "a hemisphere of sunset that will take/For ever to become decidedly/The night" in a dress "soft as a moth".

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Setting humanity against divinity

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Even worse than the silly notion that lovers are not truly cognizant of their happiness is the mistaken idea that they should "seize the present." According to this speaker, life is lived "less in the present" than in the future, and even less in the present and future combined as in the past.

This speaker is convinced that "The present/Is too much for the senses,/Too crowding, too confusing--/Too present to imagine."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Frost's Carpe Diem

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The speaker plunges in immediately describing the disturbing event that seems to occur routinely: "The old woman across the way/is whipping the boy again." And as the neighbor lady is corporally punishing the boy, she loudly condemns him testifying so that her neighbors can hear about "her goodness and his wrongs."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Hayden's The Whipping

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The speaker then claims that when the "Old Devil" transforms his "baleful eye" into "stars that melt into the gloom of night," the speaker again loses his "courage" which "quickly flies." The speaker at this point even loosens his disdain for the evil one by calling him "my dear fellow." The speaker has been transformed himself from openly acknowledging the evil of the "Old Devil" to addressing him as a chum. At this point, the speaker reveals that his winning this fight "is slim."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Johnson's The Temptress

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He discovers that the illness caused by his earlier errors is actually helpful, and he exclaims, "O benefit of ill!" He understands again that the pairs of opposites that operate on the physical level of existence can, in fact, become valuable teachers.

He finally understands, "That better is by evil still made better." In order to comprehend the good and the true, the artist needs to have the contrast of the bad and the false, which is evil.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 119

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As each insect, bird, flower, and tree struggles to contribute its own unique offering, it demonstrates all of the attributes that a duality-based existence requires. The human observer/speaker, who has surveyed all of this activity, determines that those activities include fear and love. The creatures all act out of a combination of fear and love.

The bad news is, "those who love the garden/that in the radiant vacancies they inhabit/there is only the gardener/to love them back."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Solway's The Garden

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In "After This," Guruji reminds his devotes that even after he leaves his body, his soul will retain the one and only desire that is left to a self-realized saint: he will not wish to return to an incarnation, "Unless to mingle the dewdrop tears of other prisoned soul with mine,/And show them the way that I my freedom won." He will gladly return in order to give others the methods by which he earned his "freedom."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's After This

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But aren't we all lonely, really, in our little worlds, with each click of the keyboard, with each thought that goes unexpressed? No matter how big our mental space, no matter how peopled our social sphere, no matter what kind of a romantic partner we have--real or imagined, we are all lonely for a majority of the day. We are in that space between the ears, dreaming, waking, drinking coffee, passively reading the latest news, and not engaged in a verbal, physical, or spiritual exchange with someone else. Maybe Stephen Dunn's poem "Loneliness" will help you:

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Poem for One

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Stephen Dobyns's whimsical poem about a restless householder consulting his dog on how to escape ordinary life makes me laugh out loud. But the end delivers a knife twist to kill off the unexamined life. How do we resolve the need for comfort with desires that press us in wild directions? Sometimes like this:

How To Like It

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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Bill Holm was a great man and unlike most great men he really looked like one. Six-foot-eight, big frame, and a big white beard and a shock of white hair, a booming voice, so he loomed over you like a prophet and a preacher, which is what he was.

from Garrison Keillor: A Prairie Home Companion: Bill Holm: 1943-2009

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April 5, 1974
by Richard Wilbur

The air was soft, the ground still cold.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: April 5, 1974 by Richard Wilbur

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Bridal Shower
by George Bilgere

Perhaps, in a distant café,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Bridal Shower

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The Cross of Snow
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Cross of Snow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Late Winter Rains
by Amber Coverdale Sumrall

When the rains finally start they do not stop.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Late Winter Rains by Amber Coverdale Sumrall

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Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane
by Ellen Bass

I'm not well. Neither is he.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane by Ellen Bass

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What I Believe
by Michael Blumenthal

I believe there is no justice,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: What I Believe by Michael Blumenthal

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Zero
by George Bilgere

First it was five above, then two,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Zero by George Bilgere

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by Maya Bejerano, trans. Tsipi Keller, March 1, 2009

from Mutable and Immutable

2.

Who is he who paralyzes me

from Tsipi Keller: Zeek: from "Mutable and Immutable," a 10-poem cycle by Maya Bejerano

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Memories have a way of attaching themselves to objects, to details, to physical tasks, and here, George Bilgere, an Ohio poet, happens upon mixed feelings about his mother while slicing a head of cabbage.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 205

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I.
Michelle Obama was posing

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: A Found Poem

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Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, has written a poem to celebrate the 175th Anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The poem, entitled Frozen Music, was read aloud by RIBA president Sunand Prasad at last night's Royal Gold Medal dinner for the architect Alvaro Siza.

Motion follows in the footsteps of poets such as Betjeman, Hardy and Wordsworth, all of whom were poetically inspired by buildings and architecture.


Frozen Music by Andrew Motion

An eye, shaded for better judgement,

from Andrew Motion: Building: Poet Laureate writes poem for RIBA anniversary

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And then she asked me, "Have you found a metaphor?"

"A metaphor?"

"Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?"

I knew immediately what Rose meant. I had. It was the sky--the wind. (The cynic in me cringes on rereading this. But, in fact, it's how I feel.) When I got home to Brooklyn, I asked one of my mother's friends whether she had a metaphor for where my mother was. She unhesitatingly answered: "The water. The ocean."

The idea that my mother might be somewhere rather than nowhere is one that's hard for the skeptical empiricist in me to swallow.

from Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: Finding a Metaphor for Your Loss
also Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: The Long Goodbye

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The beasts take advantage of the chaos and try to seize the throne. Humility is too humble to claim what is rightfully hers, the proud plume now spoiled by her tears, but she exhorts the Virtues to fine the beasts by demanding they bring double the number of gifts to the next meeting of the (now legislative) court.

That's the bare and somewhat tortuous story: what it symbolises is a more complicated matter. The rich interpretative possibilities, will, I am sure be fully explored by that clever and dedicated band, the posters of Poem of the Week.

[by George Herbert]

Humilitie

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Humilitie

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(The relationship too between Black Mountain and Black Arts has not been looked at closely enough, particularly in both movements' affinities for poetry as a speech act wherein the use of words overrides any attempt to lock down for them a kind of meaning.) By weaving African song into American English, these writers, Lorenzo [Thomas] argues, brought new perspectives to American poetry.

from Dale Smith: Bookslut: Marsupial Inquirer: Lorenzo Thomas, American

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"Philosophizing always means personal experience and expression of the wealth of being," [William A.] Luijpen writes. In other words, while it is certainly useful to become acquainted with various systems of thought, authentic philosophy means thinking through the problems posed by philosophy on one's own and arriving (or not) at one's own conclusions.

I have been re-reading Luijpen's book and find myself surprised to discover how much it has shaped my thinking.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: The train of thought so far--where my column has taken me

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by Caroline Parke

Like an ancient cartographer

from Express-News: Poetry: 'House plans'

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Theodor Seuss Geisel was born on March 2, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father was a brewmaster and his mother the daughter of a baker.

As a young woman, his mother had worked in her father's shop, where she memorized the names of each pastry to recite to her customers. When Geisel was a young boy, she often recited her "pie-selling chants" to lull him to sleep. Later in life, Geisel would attribute his poetic impulses to his mother's rhyming.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss, Children's Book Writer/Illustrator

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Bottleneck by Louis MacNeice

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Bottleneck by Louis MacNeice

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Dumb Show

by Suzanne Wise

The spine does its turtle charade

from Guernica: Poetry: Dumb Show

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'First Love' by Jan Duncan-O'Neal

He sat silent under the baby grand

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'First Love' by Jan Duncan-O'Neal

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Contemplation
by Meredith Root-Bernstein

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Contemplation

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Hawkins Stable
by Jean Valentine

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Hawkins Stable

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[by Eamon Grennan]

Off the skin of water scumbled blue a ghostly

from The Oregonian: Poetry: Off the skin of water scumbled blue a ghostly steam

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By Kay Ryan

The wreck

from PBS: Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'Salvage'

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Of her poem, Marie [Harris] said, "Every year I write a Valentine poem for my husband, Charter Weeks. The drab, cold month of February, however, is not terribly conducive to romantic notions, so sometimes my thoughts turn to the darker side of deep love: the specter of loss."

Valentine

Familiar enemies have wiped out the flock of Barred Rocks,

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poems from the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot

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[by Karen Smith]

Sounds & Signs of Spring in Portsmouth

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Sounds & Signs of Spring in Portsmouth

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In this collection, she has arranged her numbered prose stanzas in groups of eight to twelve, embedding in each group a quotation that she calls an inlay. These inlays are brief, even fragmented, lines from thinkers past and present, ranging from Ruskin to Lévi-Strauss to Sontag. The idea of the poetic inlay, [Donna] Stonecipher explains in a note to the reader, came to her while viewing a museum display of inlaid furniture.

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Curiosity in Motion

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In his book-length poem, Natural Mechanical (CB Editions, £7.50), J O Morgan charts the self-education of "Rocky", Ian Seoras Rockcliffe. Playing truant from school, Rocky, and the reader, learns much from the "peaks, mists, creatures, breath" of Skye in this arrestingly lovely memoir.

From Natural Mechanical

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: J.O. Morgan

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"Addicts"
By Carol Muske-Dukes

from Slate: "Addicts" --By Carol Muske-Dukes

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by Adam Sol, February 20, 2009

Jeremiah at the Outlet Mall

Even the parking lot is a three day walk across,

from Zeek: Two Poems by Adam Sol

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Poetic Obituaries

With his love for poetry, Mr. [Ted] Burk gravitated toward Beatnik, bohemian, and hippie circles, and he regarded psychedelic drugs as a path to enlightenment. He recalled reading poetry with Allen Ginsberg in New York City, and he met Abby Hoffman in jail while doing time for financial misdeeds.

During the mid-1960s, Mr. Burk's band, the CIA (Citizens for Interplanetary Activity), shared the bill with up-and coming stars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

from Bay Area Reporter: Radical Faerie Ted "Haia" Burk dies

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In every community they lived, Nellie [Crandall] was active in her church and played the organ and piano and sang in the church choir. She also enjoyed reading, crocheting, word search, crossword puzzles, writing poetry and short stories. She was a member of Baxter County Poetry Club in Mountain Home. She was well-known for her excellent spelling ability.

from The Baxter Bulletin: Nellie Grace Crandall, 88

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[Friends] remembered [Herbert] Davison as a man with an insatiable curiosity about verse, attending readings by Robert Bly, and buying a ticket to HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" at the Palace Theatre in Stamford, or giving away his jewelry and performing other acts of kindness.

Davison's poem, "My Soul Knows Things," was read twice by his fellow poets--Rona Schankerman, who knew Davison for 20 years and wore a pearl necklace the retired engineer and grandfather of five had given her, and Eleni Begetis Anastos, Curley's owner.

"My soul knows things, my mother never knew," Schankerman read. " like who to trust with secret thoughts and in whose hands to place my heart."

from The Advocate: Victim of Stamford parking lot assault remembered in verse

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[Jessica Fairchild] worked at Jerry's Home Quality Foods and also Mark's Economart. For the past four years she has worked as a PCA in the Twin Cities.

Miss Fairchild loved to read poems and also write her own. One of her favorite things to do was to watch movies, and she also enjoyed listening to music, her favorite songs being "Purple Rain" by Prince and "When Doves Cry."

from The McLeod County Chronicle: Jessica Fairchild, 24, of Minneapolis

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When his creative-writing students at Southwest Minnesota State University complained one day of having nothing to write about, he pointed to one of the ubiquitous black-and-orange insects. "You could write a million poems about that box elder bug," he told them.

To prove his point, [Bill] Holm went home and wrote a "bunch of poems about that box elder bug," said John Calvin Rezmerski, a poet and longtime friend. "Then it occurred to him that a box elder bug could be a metaphor for everything in our culture." Holm's book, "Boxelder Bug Variations: A Meditation on an Idea in Language and Music," was published in 1985.

from Pioneer Press: Writer Bill Holm, 65: The quintessential Minnesotan, 'bigger than life'
also MinnPost: Minnesota mourns the loss of author Bill Holm

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"I don't think we'd ever have gotten the Hyatt Regency atrium without John's collaboration with the people who administer codes. . . . He did that in New York, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Singapore, wherever we were."

Mr. [John] Street was born in Fort Payne, Ala. He earned his architectural degree at Auburn University, where he played guitar in a band called the Dixie Cats. He was a poet, known for writing while on his commutes between Marietta and Atlanta. And he had a passion for books, collecting an estimated 15,000 of them over the years and giving most of them away to colleges.

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: John Street, 81, helped build Atlanta's skyline

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After the the Warsaw Pact Troops invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which crushed the reform process and restored a tough communist rule in the country, [Jan] Vladislav was again banned from publishing. He then founded the Kvart samizdat publisher's that issued over 120 books, including his collections of poems, essays and criticism.

Vladislav was among the first signatories of the Charter 77 pro-democracy manifesto. In 1981 he was forced to leave the country for exile in France.

from Czech Happenings: Czech poet, Charter 77 signatory Jan Vladislav dies

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Even though [Peter] Wild was struggling with his health, [Jason] Brown said he was determined to finish teaching this semester.

"Physically, he knew he was dying but he wasn't going to let anything stop him." Brown said. "It's a true loss. We're really going to miss him here. He died in his boots."

"Peter had published over 2,000 poems in his lifetime, more than anyone else in the history of the UA English department," said friend and English professor Carl Berkhout.

from Daily Wildcat: UA poetry professor passes away

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[Bernie Wiepper] moved on to graphic renderings for area architects, designing sets for Kanawha Players productions, and commissioned oil portraits and sculptures, in addition to watercolor landscapes, woodcarving, tombstone design, boat-building, poetry and songwriting.

Wiepper, with his trademark black beret and quick wit, was a fixture in downtown Charleston, where he worked in studios on Capitol Street and Hale Street.

from The Charleston Gazette: Charleston artist Bernie Wiepper dies at 84

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